Playing roms on a Switch means you’re NOT emulating, that’s the reason people jailbreak them. Plenty of Switch games run like crap on a Steam Deck, and the more demanding games are difficult to get running at all via emulation.

I’m not saying a jailbroken Switch is the best option, I’m just saying there are pros and cons. Honestly, I’d recommend OP get a cheap desktop PC with a budget GPU instead of a Steam Deck, unless they need it to be portable. It would perform better for emulation.

What features do you specifically want? You mentioned sandboxing. Anything else?

I’d say just keep it simple. If you’re comfortable with Debian then stick with that, study up and learn how to harden it. Kali, ParrotOS, Mint, Ubuntu…they’re all just based on Debian with different preinstalled apps and desktop environments. Fedora and Arch are kinda weird and unique, I’m not sure if I’d recommend those for anyone, unless you KNOW that’s what you need. Qubes seems interesting, I’m not familiar with that.

But I’ll point out that ALL of these distros are miles ahead of Windows in terms of privacy. So just by using Mint for a while, you were already ahead of the curve.

Right, but it’s best to call that “source available” so the pedants don’t crucify you 🙄

It’s all we talk about here lol

Love how the headline equates the shame of viewing porn with the shame of viewing anime

Torrents still work, they’ll just be a little slower and you won’t be able to seed much at all. If you’re using public trackers it works fine. But if you want to use a private tracker that forces you to maintain a ratio, you’ll run into problems.

Behold! I have the answer, at least if you’re willing to use Qbittorrent and the PIA app: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/81n70q/help_with_port_forwarding_on_qbittorrent/jr2mptg/

This is an AutoHotKey script that runs at boot. It basically babysits the Qbittorrent port for you, making sure it matches your randomly assigned PIA forwarded port. I’m guessing this is also possible using a different VPN or torrent client, but you’d have to find your own script for that. Also, make sure to bind Qbittorrent to your VPN interface: https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/ssy8vv/guide_bind_vpn_network_interface_to_torrent/

P.S. I should point out that port forwarding on your VPN isn’t TOTALLY necessary…but if you don’t forward ports, your download speeds will be slower and you’ll barely be able to seed at all (this is known as a “dick move” and it will get you banned from private trackers).

P.P.S. I should ALSO point out that your forwarded port does not change very often if you keep your VPN connected! So you don’t actually NEED this little script, you could just check the port once a week and make sure that Qbittorrent matches it. For example, I’ve been on the same port in PIA for at least a month now, and I’ve definitely rebooted my PC a couple times for updates. So it seems that the PIA app often just reconnects to the same server and uses the same port, but YMMV.

Yeah pirating games is way sketchier than pirating movies. I used to do it when I was a kid, but nowadays I know enough to avoid random .exe’s. That’s basically just volunteering to be a part of a botnet.

Also, most of the games I’m personally interested in are online multiplayer titles. Playing pirated games online can be very difficult or basically impossible, depending on the game.

Game piracy certainly isn’t dead, but there are valid reasons that it’s less popular.

Yes, you have to find your own trackers, that’s always been the case. And Lidarr does help with renaming and organizing files, yes. I’d argue that this person is making things harder by searching for FLAC files specifically, which is unnecessary. Most people don’t care about lossless, so it’s harder to find. Makes perfect sense to me.

Also, check out Soulseek. It’s a proprietary app that doesn’t use torrents, but it’s P2P and it’s very popular.

You’ve been out of the game for too long, friend. We have Lidarr now…among all the other tools mentioned here.

For the record, a Plex pass isn’t required to watch remotely…but if you like Plex, sticking with Plex is fine. Jellyfin is cool and open source, but it doesn’t have any killer features that Plex is missing. They both do basically the same thing, it’s the minor details that are different.

Right, but it wouldn’t show those people in the seed number. If it says there are 9 seeders, that means that 9 are actually online right now.

The letters from your ISP have nothing to do with them monitoring your traffic. When you torrent, you’re connecting to a public network of seeders and leechers. Copyright holders pay people to monitor that public list of IP addresses, and they record your IP (because you connected publicly, in the open, and uploaded or downloaded). Then, they send your ISP a letter reporting that your did an illegal thing, and asking them to punish you. Finally, your ISP sends you a letter making some vague threats and asking you to stop. They might make you do a training course to educate you on why piracy is bad, and they might cut off your internet until you pass a quiz and promise not to pirate stuff again. They go through this charade not because it actually accomplishes anything, but because they don’t give a shit, and they’re just doing the bare minimum to keep lawyers off their back.

Nope. I’d argue that Mullvad is not for most pirates, unless you’re actually worried about being jailed for your piracy (depends on what country you’re in). If you just want to get the letters from your ISP to stop, there are much cheaper VPNs that can do that.

Mullvad is for actual privacy, which many VPNs don’t really give you. If you gave them an email address and credit card, then it ain’t private, kids!

Time for 13ft.io

What does this have to do with piracy?

MyAnonamouse for audiobooks. But they have strict rules about seeding and activity. Stricter than any other private tracker I’ve seen.

A highly skilled hacker guessed that our admin password was "admin2019“

So, if I set up an I2P router on my network and use Qbittorrent, would it theoretically be possible to contribute to I2P using the torrents that I already seed? Or is it not that easy?

You could also try split tunneling to specify that Qbittorrent goes through your VPN: https://protonvpn.com/support/protonvpn-split-tunneling/

I was under the impression that this would be redundant if you’re properly binding to an interface, but maybe it will help in your case.