HTTP works fine in Firefox unless you set it to HTTPS only. Even then, you only have to click off a warning to open an HTTP site.

Put a multi port NIC in your router PC and use a separate unmanaged switch for each network then.

I would just get a basic layer 2 managed switch and use VLANs. The 5 port and 8 port switches are super cheap these days.

It gets rid of most of the login attempts for me. I don’t use a popular port though. Pick a 5 digit port so they have to put in some effort to find it.

The SSH and VPN traffic is encrypted. Unless your private keys have been compromised, nobody can see what is going over the tunnel. They can log things like the IP addresses that are connecting to it and how much data is being transferred though.

Just install a VPN server on your computer or router. That’s all you need unless you’re stuck on CGNAT.

You can get a free VPN from Proton.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t recommend putting something power hungry like a GPU in one of these. A NIC will be fine though.

They are not USB based, they just happen to use a USB 3 cable to carry the PCIe signals.

If you don’t want to risk modifying the slot, try one of the cheap PCIe risers on amazon and send it back if it doesn’t work. You will need a case with a couple of extra slots under the motherboard in order to fit the riser in there though.

It will run slower, but that probably won’t be an issue unless you plan to max out all 4 ports simultaneously.

Linux native games are great as long as the engine is open source. If it’s closed source, it will eventually stop running on up-to-date distros some time after the developer stops updating it. For closed source games, it would be better to develop for excellent wine/proton compatibility so the game will continue to be playable long after it stops getting updates.

The trick is to use autodl-irssi or autobrr to download the torrent the second it gets added to the tracker. As long as you have a very fast internet connection, you will usually be over 1:1 before it finishes downloading.

yt-dlp is a fork of youtube-dl, which was released in 2006.