Let me be the Devil’s advocate here.

You/we (as users) are being compensated by being permitted onto whatever service is being gatekept by Recaptcha. We profit further by having that service not be completely tainted by bots. Sure, recaptcha ain’t even close to perfect and can be easily bypassed, but any barrier of entry is better than none at all.

Google profits by getting free training for their models.

And the service provider profits by saving on bandwidth, moderation etc., which in turn benefits the users too in the form of a less degraded service.

There are many things to dislike about Google and what they are doing to the web. Recaptcha should not even be in your top 100.

Yes to the routing, no to the port thing. A URL (i.e. qbittorrent.yourdomain.tld) is simply much easier to remember and work with than an IP:Port combination (i.e. 87.253.143.32:8080).

It also has a security benefit, because if you expose your server to the internet, you only have to open the http(s) ports of your webserver in your firewall and not the ports of the applications behind it. The webserver will do all the communication with your backend and then serve the information to the requester, so you have a buffer in-between.

Less open ports = less potential points of attack.

At least that’s how I understand it. I’m just a hobbyist, so if I got it wrong, feel free to correct me.

Frankly, if you want to use nginx as your reverse proxy and don’t want to get too deep into nginx configuration files and stuff, check out Nginx Proxy Manager. It’s a GUI frontend that automatically gets you SSL certificates for your subdomains, super useful.

Depends on what mode you’re playing.

Primarily, there’s casual matchmaking, which actually is full of new players. Sadly, especially in off-hours, there’s also a lot of bots hosted by some mentally unstable script kiddies (no joke, they buy in a bot hosting framework and just pop that on a VPS somewhere) dedicated to ruining the game for everyone with aimbots, mic and chat spam etc. They abuse the fact that Valve hasn’t updated the anticheat in what feels like years. Regardless, there are still tons of healthy games to be found and bots usually are kicked within seconds.

Additionally, there are community servers which, depending on the actual community playing there, can have bonkers veterans or absolute noobs. These servers often are modded, too.

Ooooooo, I didn’t know about that project! I’ll definitely spin up a VM and check LMDE out. Thanks!

I run Ubuntu on my home servers, simply because I always used it, resources and help are plentiful and it’s well documented. I thought.

Took me a while to realize that after moving to a new machine and upgrading to 22.04 docker was installed as a fucking snap and a bunch of my apps didn’t work because of that. I got it all running now, but every VM and LXC I’ll install going forward will be running Debian instead. Fuck this annoying shit.

Edit: Or I might try out Mint Mate, since it’s what I know best (aka Ubuntu) without snaps. What would you guys recommend for a basic homelab?