brakenium

Who cares with storage nowadays? I just use filelight or command line based tools to determine big storage hogs when I need to

Cloudflare tunnels definitely aren't wrong, you're just not entirely using open source software. It's a very good option if you need to open things to the public or want to learn more about cloud services

You can selfhosted tailscale so that they don't have any access. You can't with cloudflare tunnels as far as I know. Tailscale's client is open source, so is their Headscale server which originally was developed by a 3rd party. You can look into the code for that. Not sure what you'd want me to say. If you really want to be informed I'd inspect the code yourself

Tailscale shouldn't be getting your data anyway. It's a mesh VPN that directly connects devices after their auth server gives out certs and let's clients know where to find another. If you're not comfortable with using their server for this I'd suggest you look into the open source headscale server. I do remember it routing through their server in the rare case NAT punching doesn't work

Why would I do that instead of going to the office of my company? Besides, knowing me, my productivity wouldn't be much better if any compared to at home

I tend to have a harder time focusing at home compared to at work. I doubt the productivity difference is the same way for everyone

A pipe would be: cat /dev/random | tee /dev/null

Because that genuinely is what I think, but when I leave I feel tired out of nowhere

Why are you attacking so many loud majorities at once? Not everyone that likes some of those hates systemd or belittles users for

I used to use Ninite, but Chocolatey has so many more packages. These days I only have to export my package list to a file, reinstall windows, install chocolatey and install the packages by importing the file. That just leaves my favourite debloat script, some light setting changes and maybe the one or two programs that aren't on Chocolatey

In that case I would like to recommend you install Arch at least once. Not to actually use in production, but it made a lot of things click for me that help me with server stuff too. Just follow along with the install guide on the wiki inside of a VM.

If you really want to know what applications are essential I'd install a window manager and not just install the gnome package. Though even just installing your favourite DE will work fine.

I've heard other people recommend Gentoo and Linux from scratch as well for this purpose since they go even deeper, but that may be too much to start off with and I haven't done that myself

It's probably best to use an immutable distro like NixOs or Fedore SilverBlue when installing for people who don't know Linux and don't want to learn