You have two options for setting up https certificates and then some more options for enabling it on the server:

1: you can generate a self signed certificate. This will make an angry scary warning in all browsers and may prevent chrome from connecting at all (I can't remember the status of this). Its security is totally fine if you are the one using the service since you can verify the key is correct

2: you can get a certificate to a domain that you own and then point it at the server. The best way to do this is probably through letsencrypt. This requires owning a domain, but those are like $12 a year, and highly recommended for any services exposed to the world. (You can continue to use a dynamic DNS setup, but you need one that supports custom domains)

Now that you have a certificate you need to know, Does the service your hosting support https directly. If it does, then you install the certificates in it and call it a day. If it doesn't, then this is where a reverse proxy is helpful. You can then setup the reverse proxy to use the certificate with https and then it will connect to the server over http. This is called SSL termination.

There's also the question of certificate renewal if you choose the letsencrypt option. Letsencrypt requires port 80 to do a certificate renewal. If you have a service already running on port 80 (on the router's external side), then you will have a conflict. This is the second case where a reverse proxy is helpful. It can allow two services (letsencrypt certificates renewal and your other service) to run on the same external port. If you don't need port 80, then you don't need it. I guess you could also setup a DNS based certificate challenge and avoid this issue. That would depend on your DNS provider.

So to summarize:

IF service doesn't support SSL/https OR (want a letsencrypt certificate AND already using port 80)

Then use a reverse proxy (or maybe do DNS challenge with letsencrypt instead)

ELSE:

You don't need one, but can still use one.

Reverse proxies don't keep anything private. That's not what they are for. And if you do use them, you still have to do port forwarding (assuming the proxy is behind your router).

For most home hosting, a reverse proxy doesn't offer any security improvement over just port forwarding directly to the server, assuming the server provides the access controls you want.

If you're looking to access your services securely (in the sense that only you will even know they exist), then what you want is a VPN (for vpns, you also often have to port forward, though sometimes the forwarding/router firewall hole punching is setup automatically). If the service already provides authentication and you want to be able to easily share it with friends/family etc then a VPN is the wrong tool too (but in this case setting up HTTPS is a must, probably through something like letsencrypt)

Now, there's a problem because companies have completely corrupted the normal meaning of a VPN with things like nordvpn that are actually more like proxies and less like VPNs. A self hosted VPN will allow you to connect to your hone network and all the services on it without having to expose those services to the internet.

In a way, VPNs often function in practice like reverse proxies. They both control traffic from the outside before it gets to things inside. But deeper than this they are quite different. A reverse proxy controls access to particular services. Usually http based and pretty much always TCP/IP or UDP/IP based. A VPN controls access to a network (hence the name virtual private network). When setup, it shows up on your clients like any other Ethernet cable or WiFi network you would plug in. You can then access other computers that are on the VPN, or given access to to the VPN though the VPN server.

The VPN softwares usually recommended for this kind of setup are wireguard/openvpn or tailscale/zerotier. The first two are more traditional VPN servers, while the second two are more distributed/"serverless" VPN tools.

I'm sorry if this is a lot of information/terminology. Feel free to ask more questions.

How will a reverse proxy help?

Things that a reverse proxy is often used for:

• making multiple services hosted on the same IP and port
• SSL termination so that the wider world speaks https and the proxy speaks http to the server. This means the server doesn't have to do its own key management
• load balancing services so multiple servers can serve the same request (technically a load balancer but I believe some reverse proxies do basic load balancing)
• adding authentication in front of services that don't have their own (note that some of the protections/utility is lost if you use http. Anyone who can see your traffic will also be able to authenticate. It's not zero protection though because random internet users probably can't see your traffic)
• probably something I'm forgetting

Do any of these match what you're trying to accomplish? What do you hope to gain by adding a reverse proxy (or maybe some other software better suited to your need)?

Edit: you say you want to keep this service 'private from the web'. What does that mean? Are you trying to have it so only clients you control can access your service? You say that you already have some services hosted publicly using port forwarding. What do you want to be different about this service? Assuming that you do need it to be secured/limited to a few known clients, you also say that these clients are too weak to run SSL. If that's the case, then you have two conflicting requirements. You can't simultaneously have a service that is secure (which generally means cryptographically) and also available to clients which cannot handle cryptography.

Apologies if I've misunderstood your situation

I'm not sure what performance improvements you're talking about. As far as I'm aware, the difference between distros on performance is extremely minimal. What does matter is how up to date the DE is in the distribution provided package. For example, I wanted some nvidia+Wayland improvements that were only in kwin 6.1, and so I switched from kubuntu to neon in order to get them (and also definitely sacrificed some stability since more broken packages/combinations get pushed to users than in base ubuntu). It's also possible that the kernel version might matter in some cases, but I haven't run into this personally.

I think the main differences between distros is how apps are packaged and the defaults provided, and if you're most comfortable with apt based systems, I'm not sure what benefit there's going to be to switching (other than the joy in tinkering and learning something new, which can be fun in its own right).

For some users less experienced with linux, the initial effort required to setup Ubuntu for gaming (installing graphics drivers/possibly setting kernel options, etc) might push someone toward a distribution that removes that barrier, but the end state is going to be basically identical to whatever you've setup yourself.

The choice between distributions is probably more 'what do I want the process to getting to my desired end state to be like' and less 'how do I want the computer to run'.

I feel like this really depends on what hardware you have access too. What are you interested in doing?How long are you willing to wait for it to generate, and how good do you want it to be?

You can pull off like 0.5 word per second of one of the mistral models on the CPU with 32GB of RAM. The stabediffusion image models work okay with like 8-16GB of vram.

I'd be surprised if it was significantly less. A comparable 70 billion parameter model from llama requires about 120GB to store. Supposedly the largest current chatgpt goes up to 170 billion parameters, which would take a couple hundred GB to store. There are ways to tradeoff some accuracy in order to save a bunch of space, but you're not going to get it under tens of GB.

These models really are going through that many Gb of parameters once for every word in the output. GPUs and tensor processors are crazy fast. For comparison, think about how much data a GPU generates for 4k60 video display. Its like 1GB per second. And the recommended memory speed required to generate that image is like 400GB per second. Crazy fast.

Chatgpt is also probably around 50-100GB at most

I use qdirstat a lot to determine what files are eating all my space

This is one reason I'm switching away from pla+ back to normal pla. The esun pla+ really seems to get brittle when held under stress. This is an issue with printed parts as well. I've had parts suddenly crack in half where they were stressed over a few months.

Also it's really annoying when little bits of filament get stuck in your filament guide tube :(

There's definitely software that uses parts of the windows API that games don't touch. And doesn't work properly on Wine. I keep a windows install around just for using an analysis software for some lab equipment that refuses to start in wine.

Things like CAD software are also a struggle, though the latest wine seems to have resolved a number of graphics issues with getting PTC Creo to properly use the nvapi and nvidia graphics drivers through wine.

While wine is amazing, plenty of things don't work with it. Usually you don't need them, but if you do, you do

Mine has a setting to not send more than one notification within X minutes I under settings > notifications > app notifications > some app > minimum time between notification sounds

Firefox PWAs seem to work for me on mobile. To be fair I'm on nightly, but I can see a menu item that says "install" if the webpage has a PWA manifest. I was using voyager with it for a while before they released the play store version.