Lucky

Seems they have PWAs, here’s a guide by Mozilla for installing them on Firefox

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Installing

Don’t let lack of knowledge ever be the reason to stop trying something in homelabs! Honestly for a beginner resource ChatGPT is where I’d go for these kinds of questions. It does a great job explaining what all the terms mean and you can drill down into topics as needed such as permissions and different terminal commands you’ll need

Anyways, this link has a decent description of samba:

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-and-configure-samba#1-overview

A Samba file server enables file sharing across different operating systems over a network. It lets you access your desktop files from a laptop and share files with Windows and macOS users.

So as long as a computer is on the network it could access files stored on this hard drive. It is super useful as a first homelab project

How does that philosophy come from Windows? Windows was all about tying your application directly to the host OS via the old .net framework and COM. You had to wait for the OS to update before your app could, or the OS could randomly update and break your app

Containers as a technology are almost entirely a Linux thing as well, Windows ships with a full Linux kernel to support it now.

I follow various red-team security researchers, like the Security This Week podcast, which has mentioned how easy it makes their jobs when they find a Minecraft server on either the employees network or even a work network.

I’m sure many of the vulnerabilities come from modding like the recent fractureiser virus going around lately. If you kept it 100% vanilla it would be more secure, but at the end of the day you have a platform designed to run modified code, most of which is downloaded from external sources, and you’re going to open that up to the world? I certainly don’t want that within ping’s reach of my home computer or firewall

You will want to isolate the Minecraft server because it is notoriously easy to hack. If you can isolate it then Cloudflare is better than exposing your IP and opening ports at least. Tailscale would require registering each client using VPN so it isn’t accessable by anyone except trusted clients, and you’re not exposing ports/IP.

No matter what though, don’t let that server be able to talk to anything else on your network or even the admin login on your router/firewall. Treat it like it contains malware already

What is your upload speed? Many ISPs give you 50 download but <5 upload, that would be a huge bottleneck

The biggest issue is security though. Unless you’re setting up a VPN that only works when you set up a secured client on each device, I wouldn’t trust that server to have access anywhere on the network. I would strongly recommend against opening any ports on your firewall as well. Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are popular for homelabs that might be useful here and free for your use case

Microsoft develops vscode as open source, but compiles it with proprietary telemetry tooling.

VSCodium compiles from the same source code but without the telemetry