If I was in your shoes I’d probably build my own hypervisor box and rent colo space for it. Strictly because your requirement to migrate VMs to your own system later is more trouble than it’s worth.

I don’t know for sure but I’d guess you would pay less for colo than renting someone’s server for a year or two. Renting bare metal is stupid expensive.

I self host Bitwarden and it’s free to self host. You only have to pay for a license if you need multiple users or want to use their cloud services, I believe. My instance is 100% self hosted and completely isolated from the internet, and it works fine.

I self host it because I self host everything, but for credential managers I would never trust any 3rd party closed source utility or cloud service. Before I used a password manager I tracked them all manually with a text file and a TrueCrypt volume. I think giving unrelated credentials to 3rd parties is asking for trouble - they definitely don’t care as much about them as you do!

If you’re going to self host any credential manager, make sure you have an appropriate backup strategy, and make sure you have at least one client synced regularly so that you can still access passwords if the server itself dies for some reason.

My weapon of choice

Same way I do at work. Different accounts and passwords for each service internally. Any service exposed to the net (game and email servers mostly) is on a segregated network and each machine has unique credentials to help prevent lateral movement. Self hosted Bitwarden tracks it all.

I do it for the same reason I require outbound firewall rules for almost everything on my home network - I’m a masochist.

What’s the easiest way for a motivated amateur to get that set up?

There really isn’t an easy way. You’d have to run the Windows VM within Linux then assign the PCI device (your GPU) to the VM. Look up gpu passthrough if you really want to dive into it. I find it much easier to just throw a second drive in the machine for a Windows install and dual boot. If you want to dual boot with Windows, make sure Linux is installed first and on a different physical drive, unless you want to be sad later, and by sad I mean learn how to unfuck your Linux install after Windows overwrites the bootloader due to some random update.

Welcome to the club! I did the same thing earlier this year, although I ended up moving from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed after a couple weeks due to needing support for some bleeding edge hardware.

Thanks to Steam / Proton it’s been relatively painless!

All well and good until you lose another disk 2 days into re-striping. Which is not that uncommon because that puts a lot of load on the surviving disks! Remember, RAID is not a backup.

I always buy new because time spent fixing a problem or recovering data with a used drive ain’t worth it to me. It may be to you. A manufacturer refurb might be ok, in fact I do buy refurb monitors sometimes, but not data storage.

And ruin my uptime stats? Are you mad?!?!

Among the many things I run are my own email servers so, yeah gotta be up all the time. And yes I have a UPS behind every electronic device in my house except the TV because if that dies I get to buy a new one.

I’ve probably spent upwards of $2000 on UPSes and replacement batteries over the last 20 years, but if it saved even one of my servers from taking a hit it was worth it. Servers are expensive and my time is valuable to me.

Found the guy that never worked in end user support.

So dumb. How many hobbyists will pay that? A tiny fraction. Then in 4-5 years these guys will be sitting around wondering why their new business customer numbers fell off a cliff.

Don’t bite the hand that proselytizes for you at the office.

I use Cloudflare as my registrar and public DNS. And only for that. Sorry but they don’t get to peek at my network traffic.

Indeed. I haven’t run into a modern game that it can’t handle. The only thing it has struggled with that I play is old Command & Conquer titles, but that’s a Proton issue.

I can’t imagine a different distro would be any different.

BZZZZZZZZZZZT I’m sorry but that answer was not correct. Next player!

Seriously try some of the other distros and you’ll have a much more pleasant experience. I already recommended Tumbleweed in another reply but man, anything but Arch is gonna be an improvement for somebody trying to make the switch from Windows gaming for the first time.

I switched my gaming PC to Linux a few months back. I distro hopped for a while due to various issues, and landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Everything just works (except for the occasional bug in the updates where I have to wait for the next snapshot for a fix, but that’s NBD).

Caveat: I’m all AMD so no Nvidia stuff to worry about. YMMV.

On-premises. Please, for the love of god.

Like it a lot. It’s Firefox without ever having to worry about an update sneaking in more telemetry.

Never had an issue. Every time I see a headline about how Google is trying to screw over adblockers again, I check and… everything works fine.

I use Librewolf these days, but same difference.

Resurrecting this ancient post of mine to say that I finally figured this out. The problem was that my internal certificate on the Bitwarden server had a validity period of several years. When I read an article about the time limitations Apple imposed in iOS for certificates, it clicked that this might be the problem even though the errors I was getting were seemingly unrelated.

Sure enough, I changed the cert to one with a 1 year expiration and the app works fine on my iPhone now.

Just posting this in case anyone else stumbles across this post after seeing the same kind of errors. I still don’t like that Apple arbitrarily imposed this limit on my own device with my own server and my own CA, but it’s easy enough to work around.

They are making Cloud Microsoft sysadmins, as opposed to on-premises sysadmins. Which means the new crop of admins are just high tier application admins, and have no idea how to manage infrastructure, configure hardware, or actually troubleshoot problems with the application, since they don’t have access to it at that level. All of this makes businesses more and more reliant on the cloud, which is exactly what these providers want.