I can’t think of a weird or baffling event of my own, but yours was definitely weird. Maybe not for the reasons you think.

I know some JWs, and while they definitely don’t gamble, the rest of that doesn’t add up at all. They party and drink and listen to music, openly. I mean they won’t get blackout drunk, but frankly neither will I.

How old were you guys? Maybe they had super overly strict parents?

I’ve never heard of this before. I was on IRC in the oughts, probably a bit late to see it happening. Neat.

I don’t know about proton, I don’t think they do. PIA works fine also

That sucks. Unfortunately I’ve never run it in Windows. I’ve run mostly Linux on everything for years now, I’m down to one never-used Windows desktop, and a VM on proxmox that I keep up to run a handful of critical windows-only programs.

I’m not sure I’d be much help to you

Ah gotcha, no worries.

You can get away without port forwarding if the Linux ISO you’re trying to get has a lot of peers who DO have port forwarding. But your speed could be slower because of it. And if you want a more obscure ISO that doesn’t have a lot of support, doesn’t have a lot of peers, then your speed will likely suffer, and might not be able to download anything at all.

It’s something to research. If you don’t like PIA, proton also has port forwarding 👍

So crazy to hear this, I literally recommend PIA to everyone who asks. It’s cheap and hasn’t given me issues in 8 years of using it.

Plus it actually supports port forwarding still, unlike mullvad, unfortunately.

That’s a bummer. I’ve had PIA for almost 8 years straight, it’s been rock solid. I can count on one hand the number of issues I’ve had with them.

Granted, their headless Linux program, piactl, is finicky and not well documented. But once you get it dialed in, configured right, it just works.

Use it on my phone, laptop, several connections open at once, no problems 🤷‍♂️

Edit: Just read the second half of your comment. What’s your problem exactly? Maybe I’ve ran into it before, no promises haha