Just in case you didn’t circle back, the other commenter is correct. Just like Debian repositories, Arch repositories also haven’t been poisoned like this . AUR has recently, but that’s equivalent of like on Debian adding 3rd party repos, but AUR is just a meta collection of those unofficial user repos basically. Arch documentation even warns against blindly installing from AUR, and to read the pkg build first since it’s basically the same thing as copy and pasting a curl command from a GitHub repo’s readme.

No problem!

I completely know what you mean, it took a lot of research before I felt comfortable enough trusting a public instance enough to use.

So that solution would still decrease their ability to fingerprint you by a lot, but really the big problem would all the people/scripts randomly hammering your ip. They wouldn’t get past your password. But it being public and discoverable would meant you’d constantly be getting hit with a bunch of automation scanning your ports. And the security risk isn’t the concern, it’s more the heavy traffic slowing down your connect from them. It sounds like you’d be fine from a security stand point. But you’d have to put up something to block the traffic.

You could always self host, use that when you’re at home or connected to home through VPN and use it for more personal searches, and then use public instances when you’re connected to other vpns for more general or vague searches. Mixing and matching like that will at least add some noise and make you less identifiable. Kind of best of both worlds.

(Not an expert) hosting your own instance will make you more identifiable to big tech than if you used a public instance, but it would still increase your privacy compared to giving everything to them, and also prevent you from giving a public instance your data. I currently use “priv.au” but do plan on hosting my own in the near future. Some people who host their own instance even intentionally open it up to the public to crowd source more data points so that their traffic blends in better (not saying I recommend that though).

Tldr: it should still be worth it

In regards to connecting, you should still be able to hop from other vpns to your home network, just keep in mind they you will get higher latency jumping from their VPN network back to yours. I don’t recommend opening it up publicaly just to do that, unless you plan on going all in and having something in front of it like “fail2ban” and Anubis" another option is looking into “tailscale” and if you don’t trust their central server you can selfhost with “head scale” or use a different but adjacent product “pangolin”. These products basically let you creat your our VPN that spans multiple network.

OP, I had a similar issue, and I had to blow way the wine prefix.

Someone else will have to chime in, but I believe it’s the “compat data” folder, but be careful because some games like to keep saves in there.

After you do that, as someone else mentioned, try GE-Proton.

Also I’m not familiar with your card, if it is older, I believe there is a certain gen where they stopped adding older cards to the newer drivers. A lot of the distros you mentioned are new, maybe roll the dice and if you feel up for it try Debian. If games boot, the. You either have to grab the open source driver or use an older version.

Also for the future (after you’re up and running) you shouldn’t skip the shaders. Steam crowd sources them from similar configs and build, and vulkan can generate them before playing so that game play is smoother. Direct 12 trys to generate shaders during game play, which results in stuttering.

If possible it might help to have a couple demo PCs out so that they and try different desktop environments. Some might be more enthusiastic if they can not only play around with it when it’s up and running (and gives people something to do while your helping others) but also if the DE matches their “workflow better” it also gives you a chance to show them how to do common tasks. Maybe different demos have different “suites”, like here’s the gaming demo, here’s regular, productivity, etc

I agree with some of the other posts, I’d stick with 1 distro (whichever all the helpers are most comfortable with) so that you can speak confidently about it, and decrease the chances of something going wrong and you having to break out Google and the terminal. A DE is an easier choice to explain that different distros affecting and impacting things they can’t see. Especially if you might have to provide tech support during the beginning. Maybe just say a throw away line or 2 about there being different distros, just like there’s different kinds of cheese. Still same thing at its core, just different options.

I also recommend a couple spare external hard drives for them to back up their files.

I’d maybe do just a brief overview at the beginning. And go more in depth afterwards so they don’t get overloaded.