At the time I tried (2009), I was too young and afraid of messing up my Windows (I didn’t even know if I was able to remove Windows and not loose the warranty), so I was finally did thanks to the marvelous Wubi installer. It let you try Ubuntu without messing around with partitions. Thanks to that, I was able to start learning Linux until I gained confidence and did a proper dual boot.
Now I only use Arch, even for work.
Port forwarding does matter to increase ypur availability. It is not a requirement to be able to seed and you can also seed at pretty decent rates without port forwarding, though. I am doint it with mullvad without PF and it’s fine.
In my opinion, there are no other VPNs with a similar quality of mullvad that support PF at the price of mullvad.
We really need to push for the use of i2p for torrenting. Given that the the offer of VPNs with port forwarding that are decent is little and decreasing every year.
I’ve been able to found them in 1337x and TorrentGalaxy
Been uing them for a long time. But it is really hard to find a good one under 40/50€. Normal mouses have a lot of the goodones in 30€.