I really feel like people who are beginners shouldnt play with exposing their services. When you set up Caddy or some other reverse proxy and actually monitor it with something like fail2ban you can see that the crawlers etc are pretty fast to find your services. If any user has a very poor password (or is reusing a leaked one) then someone has pretty open access to their stuff and you wont even notice unless you’re logging stuff.

Of course you can set up 2FA etc but that’s pretty involved compared to a simple wg tunnel that lives on your router.

Meanwhile linux nowadays is ridiculously easy to install and can be run without issues on hardware that is almost 10 years old. I just bought an 8th gen i3 mini desktop machine for 100€ and it runs all my selfhosted services plus functions as a desktop. The bootup and general speed of the OS is on par with a 2000€ pc or mac for regular office use. Planned obsolense is obviously the reason you cant use those machines for more than 5 years without installing linux on them (especially the pcs)

People should stop buying new computers unless it’s needed for llm’s or games.