imgur has more recently blocked access from numerous VPS, VPN and Tor.

Safest image download would be from Microsoft website. You need activation? Look up Microsoft Activation Script (MAS) on Github. Read the readme on how to use it.

nowadays I assume cracked software (unless if the crack script is fully open source) to likely contain some kind of malware and I just sandbox them since I play cracked games with bottles flatpak anyway.

I don't care much about what other people are comfortable in using, but please don't expect tech support from me. Every time I have to use Windows I get frustrated at how it forcibly feeds me stuff I don't want. Although I admit that sometimes I joke to people to switch to Linux when they get frustrated with Windows as well, but that's about it.

And also, some popular memes about Linux are probably just that, memes. Don't take it too seriously.

mullvad no longer portforwards, so probably not a good option to torrent with. proton is good if you use their whole ecosystem.

Most people only relate Linux to Ubuntu, Linux init system to SysVInit or SystemD, Containerisation to Docker or Kubernetes, Linux desktop to Gnome.

In some cases, it may be due to official support being available but most of the time it's just that people are being taught Ubuntu first as "THE Linux" and that's what they use since then.

Those random white stripes would definitely encourage people to cross!

Recently needed to try a few distros. Downloading from direct mirrors was way slower than torrenting. So I just torrented the rest of the distros.

Unlike Vanced, they don't redistribute installation files, but rather just the patcher that includes the configurable patches. Revanced users have to already have YouTube apk whether it is from the installed YouTube app or just saved apk so that they could build a patched youtube "revanced" apk with the patcher.

However, I don't know if redistribution of a patching tool to an app that's against modification of its binaries is legal.

Is it now acceptable to leave the office on time and not join the after work nomikai?

WPS is definitely decent. I used to use WPS Office, because LibreOffice corrupted my school document files, but it felt too limited and riddled with telemetry. It never suddenly crashed on me and the compatibility was amazing.
But I have since moved back to LibreOffice because it is more feature complete and more peaceful, knowing that it's made by a trusted and open foundation. LibreOffice might still not be stable since it still often crashes and becomes unresponsive but at least I never got my documents corrupted again.

I love games that are story driven. Although if it does not have adequate interactivity, like meaningful choices and actions, then I would rather have it as a movie.

I'm hosting an email server on a VPS that has fail2ban in it. A lot of ports are open but only wireguard and knockd are listening.

For remote server management, I would use wireguard for regular ssh access, but when I need to configure the wireguard I can just disable/reenable the wireguard-only ssh firewall rule using port knocking, there is also the option of using the serial console on the VPS web ui but it is slower.

Honestly, I'm not sure myself if my public facing services face a DoS attack. Well, there's always an option of using Cloudflare. With that being said though, I think in your case you should just use a free "VPN" like Tailscale or ZeroTier.

You need to make sure that you can open some of your ports to expose your applications to the internet, also known as "port forwarding".

You need a domain name on the internet for people to access your IP address from the internet. This can be free with ddns but if you want your unique domain name, you must pay for it yearly from a domain registrar.

You also probably need a TLS, which is free of charge if you obtain it from Let's Encrypt.

And finally, just keep your server running 24/7. Keep in mind that your posts may not show up if your server becomes unresponsive or is offline.

One of the reasons why you want to keep a live-bootable operating system within one of your flashdrives or optical discs.

You probably need another device to securely boot up a live OS to recover your data. Don't use Windows, because it might still be vulnerable to autoplay scripts when mounting your infected OS partition and I assume your infected OS is Windows, so the malwares are going to be compatible and unless you know what you're doing, you probably don't want to take that chance.

Why not just use an F-Droid repo?

I am unsure if I can ELI5 those without also ELI5-ing about Computer Network, VPN and Firewall.

They are VPNs. Like a regular network, they connect your devices through their network. They may put Firewall rules to allow you to talk to X networks (any specified networks). That also means the VPN may not allow you to connect to the internet through their network. Now the difference between ZeroTier and Tailscale and other VPNs for accessing the internet is that ZeroTier and Tailscale only permit your traffic to your other devices that are bound to your account and not to the internet (your other internet data won't go through zerotier/tailscale). This configuration is great because you have a virtual and secluded network that you can connect to from anywhere via the internet using ZeroTier/Tailscale networks (with your virtually local IP on ZeroTier/Tailscale).

For some reason the session network (oxen network) now blocks my Hetzner VPS connection (I use for VPN). Have been a session user for around 2 years now and now I have to reconsider Signal.

If in order to achieve security, users have to give up their privacy and freedom, I guess mobile operating systems are behind regular desktop or server oriented operating systems. I mean no matter how secure the operating system is, with bad opsec things can go wrong pretty quickly anyway.

that is relatively low assuming "private bytes" is virtual memory usage. Is that Firefox being idle? How many tabs do you usually keep for your everyday web browsing?