Why are you running full VMs for something that can be put in a container? Sounds to me (without having any evidence or proof) that you’re running out of memory and you’re swapping and it’s taking forever. That’s what causes the VMs to slow/stop.
Why not just run your own WireGuard instance? I have a pivpn vm for it and it works great. You could also just put jellyfin behind a TLS terminating reverse proxy.
I’d suggest Alpine too. Works great for me so far.
Correct. SearxNG is very much still active. Check the GitHub page or matrix/IRC.
Cloudflare zero trust tunnel might be up your alley. Look into that. It’s free but has privacy concerns so do your homework.
It was me. Guess what I’ll be doing today.
My setup is similar. My main “desktop” is a Slackware VM through VNC/guacamole.