I am unpracticed in low power draw builds which is a must ATM so I don’t trust my speccing abilities without hands on with the hardware, and I intend to use it in a home office as a tax write off so I can’t exactly order and return until I get something working.

IMO deleting the account is more information than just not using it, legally speaking, at least in the US, deleting an account doesn’t even change the terms you agreed to, so I see no reason to do anything special.

Gitea is great, it took me about an hour or so from not knowing anything about it to having a full docker container up and running. If you are not too accustomed to self hosting I would caution against thinking it will be easy to have the server accessible to the internet as that assumption is incredibly wrong.

If you want to learn how to do it in a way that doesn’t screw you in the future, I would shy away from the GUI side of things, everyone who helps with issues related to git operates under the assumption that you are familiar with the CLI so if you don’t want to have to translate CLI commands to their respective actions in the GUI, I would bite the bullet and learn the commands.

Ivpn doesn’t support port forwarding so it probably won’t work well for filesharing. Private internet access has support for it, although I’m not thrilled with its jurisdiction atm, but that being said they have been subpoenaed before & were unable to produce logs so they probably aren’t bsing their no log policy.

I’m not sure if you are aware, but there is a reason why it is explicitly xc instead of just keepass. Xc is the Foss one & keepass is a corporate hell hole

I assume the point of the extension is to have support for autofill, if that is the case, you should be aware that it is generally a bad idea to give your browser access to that info directly since they are the definition of internet connected apps. What I do instead of autofill with keepassxc is open the vault and press the copy to clipboard buttons which works essentially the same way as autofill just with a couple more clicks.

For my notification needs I need only unified push with Mozilla sunup & if that is not an option or if it is not reliable I use websocket. The latter has battery life issues, but some services have very poor unified push servers.

I’m not sure everywhere, but I can say that any place that has a population of about 5000+ in my area is fairly well mapped, enough to mean that I haven’t used google maps in about 2 years. The less populous areas aren’t great, but I have at the very least never had issues with highways so it usually gets you close enough that you can get by.

As far as I am concerned, fluxer fills the niche of the bridge between open protocols and discord for normies. Xmpp doesn’t have clients for all major OS’s and matrix is finicky if you care about the voice and video side of things.

I don’t know how it is in the UK, but I use street complete to contribute to osm

You can read your student code, most of them do not have anything that compels you to use the services that are provided. If that is the case, refuse to use the service and make your position known, they’ll generally give you a workaround or if they say that’s how it is, you can ask for the part of the student code with the nonexistent objective reason why you must use it.

If you don’t want to be a squeaky wheel, there are technical ways of limiting the information loss, but the easiest is to not install anything and be conscious of what location, network, & device you use