Both of them have their pros and cons. It’s a matter of sacrificing convenience or security. I2P is surely a go to for me over Tor/VPN when it comes to anonymity. You will come across variety of information which is not available on clearnet/tor, but clearnet has the upper hand in abundance.

I was in the same circumstances when I started. But then I asked around which helped me properly configure it.

working on my end

You can find plenty of versions on Demonoid https://www.dnoid.to/. I’ve used them on bare metal and on virtualization.

I just checked my DNS blocked list. Topaz software do download their models from their repositories, but I haven’t come across any issues. About safety, well, its upto your threat model.

Then, Proton it is

Mullvad or Proton

I started using it on a daily bases since I switched to Linux. The distro I use as daily driver and other large projects have their support team on IRC.

It is much much better than posting on forums. You get instant response.

I can assure you this is not the case.

I’ve tested Cyberpunk 2077 on Ubuntu (not my daily driver) and it works like you’re playing on windows. Only downside is that you can’t use ray tracing since Nvidia kept that tech proprietary and exclusive to windows for now.

See, Linux doesn’t fully supports nvidia gpu, but still I’m having a great experience.

The website you mentioned made me laugh cause it mentions some weird files I never come across.

aHR0cHM6Ly9jcy5yaW4ucnUvZm9ydW0vaW5kZXgucGhw

It’s not really a hassle to configure your i2p node. I2p network recently went through a DDOS attack. Even during that point of time I had no issue surfing/torrenting.