Disappointing tgat we arent when you put it that way

I can’t work out if this is well intentioned ignorance or trolling, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and a serious answer.

The first point is there are a huge number of threats to privacy and your online and data security from connecting to the internet even in western countries.

VPNs are not just for protection from govt abuse, in fact their efficacy there is far lower than for several other use cases.

If you’re in the US (for example) and with one of the biggest ISPs then every DNS request being made is (was anyway, I assume still is) logged and your internet usage is then sold off to data brokers to profile you.

So yeah, dont trust your ISP, and if you’re dealing with a VPN that wants all that info then find a better one (proton or mullvad for exampke, you can pay with monero or bitcoin or even cash by snail mail)

Most common reason is running out of disk space. Boot from USB and have a check as to whether the update filled up the disk

My motherboard which is only a few years old (2ish?) has serial port pin outs.

You don’t need to give the VM network access to download the software if you have a linux host. You can directly mount a virtual box drive from the host, copy the file(s) onto the drive and then unmount it and start the VM as per normal.

Search for qemu-nbd iirc (network block device) - I have the how to details saved on my host (ie not on me) so ping me if you want them. Note it’s a qemu app that works for vbox

Much better

At that age cpu it’s almost certainly a hard drive not ssd.

My guess is 1-2 days. 4gb RAM is going to thrash like hell

Could be worth asking on selfhosted (how do I link a sub on lemmy ?) They probably have more relevant experience at this sort of thing.

Edit

Does this work ?

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

Context for those who are baffled (I was)

https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/

No Linus hasn’t grabbed a red rag and isn’t off to foment revolution