Yeah openwrt should be great. It uses nftables as a firewall on a Linux distribution. You can configure it through a pretty nice ui, but you also have ssh access to configure everything directly if you want.

The challenge is going to be what the ISP router supports. If it supports bridge mode then things are easy. You just put your router downstream of it and pretend like it's a modem. Then you configure openwrt like it's the only router in the network. This is the opposite of what you've suggested, using the upstream ISP router in pass through and relying on the openwrt router to get the ipv6 GUA prefix. (You might even be able to get a larger prefix delegated if you set the settings to ask for it)

If you don't have bridge mode then things are harder. There's some helpful information here https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipv6-only-slaac-dumb-aps/192059/19 even though the situation is slightly different since they also don't want a firewall. But you probably need to configure your upstream side on the openwrt router similarly.

Also looking more, the tplink ax55 isn't supported by openwrt. If you don't already have it, I'd get something that does. (Or if the default software on the ax55 supports what you want, that's fine too. I just like having the full control openwrt and similar gives)

I'd recommend something that you can put openwrt or opnsense/pfsense on. I think the tplink archers support openwrt at least.

The ISP router opening things at a port level instead of a host level is kinda insane. Do they only support port forwarding? Or when you open a port range can you actually send packets from the WAN to any LAN address at that port.

Can you just buy your own modem, and then also use your own router? (If the reason you need the ISP router is that it also acts as a modem).

Does the ISP router also provide your WiFi? If it does you should definitely go with a second router/access point and then disable the one on the ISP router.

Since games don't have to run with more than user privileges and steam runs in flatpak, you could run them as a different user account with very limited permissions.

That said, flatpak should be pretty secure as far as I'm aware if you make sure that permissions for the apps running are restricted appropriately. I'm not sure how restricted you can make steam and still have it work though

You can use offline mode for steam if you're okay with steam having internet but not games. But there's no way to use steam entirely offline. Internet access is a fundamental part of the system they have.

There's also a question of what your threat model is. Like are you trying to prevent causal access of your files by games, or like a sophisticated attempt to compromise the system conveyed through a game. For the former flatpak seems sufficient. For the latter you probably need a dedicated machine. And there's varying levels in between

Wait so the images in your post are the after images?

I think something that contributes to people talking past each other here is a difference in belief in how necessary/desirable revolution/overthrow of the U.S government is. Like many of the people who I've talked to online, who advocate not voting and are also highly engaged, believe in revolution as the necessary alternative. Which does make sense. It's hard to believe that the system is fundamentally genocidal and not worth working within (by voting for the lesser evil) without also believing that the solution is to overthrow that system.

And in that case, we're discussing the wrong thing. Like the question isn't whether you should vote or not . it's whether the system is worth preserving (and of course what do you do to change it. How much violence in a revolution is necessary/acceptable). Like if you believe it is worth preserving, then clearly you should vote. And if you believe it isn't, there's stronger case for not voting and instead working on a revolution.

Does anyone here believe that revolution isn't necessary and also that voting for the lesser isn't necessary?

The opposite is more plausible to me: believing in the necessity of revolution while also voting

Personally I believe that revolution or its attempt is unlikely to effective and voting+activism is more effective, and also requires agreement from fewer people in order to progress on its goals. Tragically, this likely means that thousands more people will be murdered, but I don't know what can actually be effective at stopping that.

I'm not sure what performance improvements you're talking about. As far as I'm aware, the difference between distros on performance is extremely minimal. What does matter is how up to date the DE is in the distribution provided package. For example, I wanted some nvidia+Wayland improvements that were only in kwin 6.1, and so I switched from kubuntu to neon in order to get them (and also definitely sacrificed some stability since more broken packages/combinations get pushed to users than in base ubuntu). It's also possible that the kernel version might matter in some cases, but I haven't run into this personally.

I think the main differences between distros is how apps are packaged and the defaults provided, and if you're most comfortable with apt based systems, I'm not sure what benefit there's going to be to switching (other than the joy in tinkering and learning something new, which can be fun in its own right).

For some users less experienced with linux, the initial effort required to setup Ubuntu for gaming (installing graphics drivers/possibly setting kernel options, etc) might push someone toward a distribution that removes that barrier, but the end state is going to be basically identical to whatever you've setup yourself.

The choice between distributions is probably more 'what do I want the process to getting to my desired end state to be like' and less 'how do I want the computer to run'.

I feel like this really depends on what hardware you have access too. What are you interested in doing?How long are you willing to wait for it to generate, and how good do you want it to be?

You can pull off like 0.5 word per second of one of the mistral models on the CPU with 32GB of RAM. The stabediffusion image models work okay with like 8-16GB of vram.

Chatgpt is also probably around 50-100GB at most

I use qdirstat a lot to determine what files are eating all my space

This is one reason I'm switching away from pla+ back to normal pla. The esun pla+ really seems to get brittle when held under stress. This is an issue with printed parts as well. I've had parts suddenly crack in half where they were stressed over a few months.

Also it's really annoying when little bits of filament get stuck in your filament guide tube :(

Mine has a setting to not send more than one notification within X minutes I under settings > notifications > app notifications > some app > minimum time between notification sounds

Firefox PWAs seem to work for me on mobile. To be fair I'm on nightly, but I can see a menu item that says "install" if the webpage has a PWA manifest. I was using voyager with it for a while before they released the play store version.