I had the same problem as OP. My solution was to port forward to my server but then block connections from all IP addresses accept from my work, which I added to an allowlist.

It’s working well so far, but I think the Cloudflare tunnel is the better option.

In the screenshots of people setups, there are always fancy terminals.

Ha, they’re just showing off their hacker side for the screenshot, plus terminals resize nicely. Tiling window managers work well for most apps. The only GUI issues I’ve had are some pop-up windows being tiled instead of floating, but that’s an easy fix. They’re not for everyone, but they work great with GUI apps.

Run your web browser from RAM for faster browsing.

https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

Good question. Flatpak doesn’t lead to fewer updates overall, but it does lead to fewer system packages installed via pacman or yay, which can run into dependency conflicts unlike Flatpak.

Flatpak provides a common runtime upon which different applications can be installed via containers, much like apps on a phone. You can then adjust the permissions for each app such as which directories it can access. It’s kind of like installing Firefox (e.g. Flatpak) and then a Firefox extension such as uBlock Origin (e.g. LibreOffice). It doesn’t matter if you’re on Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch, from the extension’s perspective it’s the same old Firefox and doesn’t touch anything else on your computer. This means uninstalling is clean and it has no dependencies on other packages installed.

The disadvantage with Flatpak is they can be slower (sometimes not even noticeable) and take up more space, although the runtime can be re-used between Flatpak applications. Personally, I like Flatpak for large GUI applications like LibreOffice, which has 170+ dependencies if installed via pacman.

I’m not an expert, but hope this helps. For more/better info, I recommend reading https://itsfoss.com/what-is-flatpak/.

I think you can use Arch for university, but I have a few suggestions:

• Don’t update packages unless you have time to fix issues. Rare, but it happens, although usually minor.
• Never mess with greeters, kernel modifications, bootloaders, or anything else before login. Fixing issues may require a live USB and take some time. Avoid the temptation! (Ask how I know…)
• Use Flatpak where you can for increased stability by way of fewer packages to update.

Of course, you could also use a non-rolling release distro. Nothing wrong with that.