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.

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

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.

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.

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 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).

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.