I switched to Linux a long time ago, it's only getting better and better. After valve started making serious investments in the ecosystem it has only gotten better for desktop usage and it simply 'works' in ways that even windows struggles with, ie: ps4 controllers/switch controllers work ootb, gamescope allows significantly more control over how games are rendered and offers a true console-like experience combined with big picture UI.

Is your VPN running on the same host as ssh? If so it could be a firewall issue. What VPN are you using?

Thin client! They're significantly more powerful than a pi and you can grab them for nothing on eBay and you can use the nvme slots for storage, I've had sd cards go bad in pis

I'm not convinced using rust is all that useful for web development. There are already plenty of other mature well optimized solutions for backend web development that includes a lot of security, qol features ootb like mature orm's with optimized database access which regardless of how fast your code is can bottleneck your site much faster if you don't have smart database access.

Yeah, theoretically rust can be faster than ruby/python/node, but it's harder to optimize it enough to get to that point and you will have a much harder time finding devs to work on such a project because the amount of backend devs that have enough rust experience is so small, they're like on the opposite sides of the ven diagram of languages for web developers.

On top of all that, languages which are heavily used for web development often get low level optimizations baked into the frameworks/languages so you can get pretty amazing performance uplifts over time to bring it to the level of lower level languages.