tangeli

You can boot Linux from a USB flash drive if your main installation isn’t working. That might be better than searching for solutions from your phone. And a bootable USB flash drive is helpful when you can’t boot from the internal drive. I always have one around, just in case, though I don’t use it very often.

Booting from USB flash drive is a bit slow. A USB attached hard drive or SSD will be much faster or, if your internal drive is big enough, you can partition it to hold two Linux installations. Then, when one isn’t working you can switch to the other with just a reboot, as long as it’s not the boot loader that’s broken.

You might find the techniques used in Network-Aware Firewall useful. You can use firewall configuration to handle connections differently depending on whether you are connected to your home network or not. Or you can use the same techniquest to do other things, depending on network connection, like bringing up your VPN or not; modifying DNS or hosts file or not; etc.

I haven’t used 13/trixie but with 12/bookworm I use jmtpfs but it’s also available for trixie.