Windows debloater fixes it, check out Sophia. It disables all the crap Microsoft forces on you

As in there is no boot entry? Or the drive was empty? There about 5 different possible causes for that that I can think of, all of which are user errors or hardware failures (or windows updates wiping boot entries xD).

Regardless, I get what you are saying, I wouldn’t recommend using Linux for 98% of people. The exception being when what you need to do is either not supported or is an absolute nightmare on Windows.

I chose to use Linux before I needed it, purely because windows always felt unintuitive, sluggish and irrationally complicated for me. Nowadays I cannot do what I need to do (for work and personal projects) on Windows or do not have the time to get it working. I maintain several Linux and Windows servers, on top of writing the software that’s running on them. I simply do not have the time to deal with a lack of documentation and the weird workarounds needed to do what I need to do on Windows.

When it comes to things like scientific computing, ML, databases and anything “backend” or low level, most of the software doesn’t support Windows and the OS level API’s are confusing as all hell.

Windows is better for the average “desktop user”, but it falls short as soon as you need to do things the average user never does.

You need to expose the ports you want to access on an external, publicly accessible server like a cheap vps. Then you can use wireguard to forward the traffic to your Pi.

I haven’t done it in a long while, so I can’t explain it well enough, try searching for “vps wireguard gateway”. That should bring up some blog posts that will explain the process better. I used a VPS I got on the AWS free tier, you really don’t need anything expensive.

Gluetun is great, but it does not work with docker swarm. I’m using a container running wireguard and Dante as a SOCKS5 proxy, everything that needs a VPN is on an internal overlay network and routes through the proxy container. Only the proxy container is part of the public network and all external traffic goes through the VPN. I use Traefik as a reverse proxy which is part of both the private and public networks. Meaning I can access the private containers (qbitorrent, prowlarr and sonarr) externally through Traefik but they cannot access anything outside the internal private network unless they route though the proxy container.

It’s not perfect but it works xD