Plex, CUPS (printing services), Minecraft servers, VPN, file sharing, DHCP/DNS/Wifi, bluetooth are some examples of basic level things systemd can help regular users manage.
It’s really hard to [accidentally] permanently break Linux to the point of requiring a reinstall.
Here’s a really good tip: Keep a live distro (I use Mint) on a USB drive. If something real bad happens, you can boot into the live distro, and chroot into your OS and do the repairs you need. While also having a live distro with web access and a browser to help.
I broke my GRUB once (or twice) and fixed it again this way.
Keep a backup of your /boot folder, GRUB (or equivalent) configs, etc, also check documentation on Arch wiki for boot process. 99.9% of the time you should be able to fix things to at least get to a TTY after boot.
I’ve been using Arch for years and can’t pull myself away because everything just works. Whats the difference between arch and whatever the derivatives are? I don’t even know what distros to arch are the Ubuntu / mint to debian
I was surprised to learn this was a thing, impressive, however;
‘the VPN app sends a request to the VPN server to open a random port’
‘the active port number will change when you disconnect and reconnect the VPN.’
This will not work OOTB with Plex for example, you would need to change the port in the app every time. It becomes difficult to serve anything statically, like a XMPP server or anything that doesn’t let you configure the port.
You also would need to be at home to check which port you’ve been assigned eg if the connection drops and you get assigned a new port, defeating the whole ‘remote access’ thing.