I didn’t particularly like the layout styling in Pop!_OS and being so new to linux, I didn’t know how much I could change aesthetics wise. KDE looks more appealing to me, I don’t know if it’s because it looks like windows, but that might be a factor? it’s the default on the distro I wanna give a try (Bazzite) which also has nudged me in that direction.
I wasn’t expecting so many people to have used Debian for things other than servers. I have it on a server myself, but I decided I needed something more set up for gaming already on my desktop. what led you to Debian specifically? the stability?
So I’m pretty new to self hosting as well, but I use Tailscale. They also have the option of working with Mullvad, though I’m not 100% on how that works. Tailscale is a VPN itself, and it’s allowed me to access all of my self hosted stuff everywhere, including on my phone. It’s been really nice, though I understand people might not want to use corporate methods.
Gluetun to my knowledge, when I use it, is just for my qbittorrent stack to access my VPN.
If you don’t want to use something like Tailscale (there’s also a self hosted option called Headscale, and others like Zerotier and I think Netbird?) there’s opening ports and using reverse proxies. I would be really careful about that one, but hopefully I’ve given you some options to look into.