A large percentage of those hosts with SSH enabled are cloud machines because it’s standard for cloud machines to be only accessible by SSH by default. I’ve never seen a serious security guide that says to set up a VPN and move SSH behind the VPN, although some cloud instances are inherently like this because they’re on a virtual private network managed by the hosting provider for other reasons.

SSH is much simpler and more universal than a VPN. You can often use SSH port forwarding to access services without configuring a VPN. Recommending everyone to set up a VPN for everything makes networking and remote access much more complicated for new users.

Shodan reports that 35,780,216 hosts have SSH exposed to the internet.

Moving SSH to ports other than 22 is not security. The bots trying port 22 on random addresses with random passwords don’t have a chance of getting in unless you’re using password authentication with weak passwords or your SSH is very old.

SSH security updates are very infrequent and it takes practically no effort to keep SSH up to date. If you’re using a stable distribution, just enable automatic security updates.

Having SSH open to the internet is normal. Don’t use password authentication with weak passwords.

It’s also ahead of gitea in some aspects: https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo

intel’s WiDi software supported Miracast, which is a standard.

Or use Miracast, AKA WiDi, Smart View, SmartShare if you just want to mirror a screen.

You don’t need a static IP to have a domain name, and you don’t always need to pay for a domain name either.

That Pentum is a budget CPU from just over 10 years ago. It has PCIe 2.0. Maybe the “gigabit” ethernet is connected to the CPU by a single 500Mbit PCIe lane.

Docker Swarm encryption doesn’t work for your use case. The documentation says that the secret is stored encrypted but can be decrypted by the swarm manager nodes and nodes running services that use the service, which both apply to your single node. If you’re not having to unlock Docker Compose on startup, that means that the encrypted value and the decryption key live next to each other on the same computer and anyone who has access to the encrypted secrets can also decrypt them.