Mordikan

Yeah, you can’t just use wireguard directly on a home network depending on provider (CGNAT) and you can’t just switch providers as most providers are in a non-compete with other providers. So, Cloudflare Mesh or Tailscale is the best option for those.

Honestly, yes.

Aside from performance issues, UE5 based-games by majority seem to follow this washed out color palette approach that I don’t like. Its not inherently the engine though as I know Expedition 33 used UE5 and its very vibrant. Its just an artistic direction those games seem to take, I guess.

In the past, CryEngine due to performance. Kingdom Come: Deliverance on release really was buggy and felt like a typical CryEngine game. I can’t for sure say that it was the engine’s fault again because Prey didn’t seem to have those issues, but historically that engine has always been a mess.

As a networking guy, for homelab setups the router is not core of your network. That role falls on the switch. In a perfect world, you’d have a layer-3 switch handling traffic between segments and only send traffic to the router for egressing the network or a few other cases. But in the real world, you have to start somewhere and that’s what you did. Don’t let anyone tell you that you did it wrong. If someone can’t make things work without having the perfect equipment, its probably the wrong hobby for those people.

Regarding network-wide adblocking, I had a squid proxy running that did this. Every machine was issued a self-signed certificate and the connections were basically MITM so I could check the calls being made. You can run into some issues with SSL-pinning in Android or things like HSTS for common websites sometimes, but overall it did function pretty well after tweaking.

If you do decide later to replace your existing router, I’d suggest trying to build your own. My current router is a mini-PC with dual NICs running Arch configured to do packet filtering, routing, a few automations, etc. It was refurbished and cost me about $80 USD. Its a really good experience in building servers and learning how various routing protocols work.