Just have fun with your machine, learning is better when you are not forced to read the fucking manual. Of course you might need to do it but do it when you have the time on something you need to.

Of course distro-related forums are a great place to start, the legendary Arch Linux Wiki is a great place (even for other distros) and I know this might be contreversial but LLMs nowadays can be useful at explaining these kind of stuff to you, especially if you feed them the adequat ressources.

how to do this, best ways to achieve that etc

Often there is multiple best ways to achieve stuff and people are not agreeing on how. Of course there is often consensus on how NOT to do but doing and learning is better in my opinion than not doing because you’re scared it’s not the best way. Just do it!

I think OP means that the community feeds a database using a platform they have no real control over, as the source code of the website/WebApp is not public.

However it is good to remind people that ProtonDB database is published under the Open Database License ODbL at this GitHub repo. To me having the db under an open license is more important than a WebApp (especially now that anyone can build such a website in a probably insecure way, using a 20$ monthly LLM subscription).

I haven’t digged into the db myself, maybe it does not come with the comments and so and only the borked, silver, gold, platinum labels.

So yes the website doesn’t seems to be open source but the database is. So anyone could rebuild an alternative from its database (which is probably the most precious part of ProtonDB). If nobody already did it yet, it’s probably because no one felt the need for, as ProtonDB already offer a valid, great and free user experience with currently no reasons to distrust the project.

One step at a time, you will eventually move to GNU/Linux in the future if this new hobby persist. But there is nothing wrong with beginning using software and tools you are already familiar with. However you will probably have to use WSL (Linux inside Windows basically) to make things work and all guides you will find will mostly be based on Docker and/or Linux. So you will definitely use Linux on your Microslop owned machine.

If you don’t have the time to learn a new OS it’s fine, but it will not necessarly make things easier, especially on the long run. That’s my take on it.

My very first self-hosting homelab was a Linux Mint old refurbished desktop PC that I was remotely accessing through AnyDesk (I was a Windows kid user at that time). Now I’m on NixOS through SSH and still learning, I do not completely comfortable but I am able to use it and learn while doing so.

I would highly encourage you to try to run a lightweight beginer friendly Linux distro such as debian, Linux Mint XFCE or Kubuntu if you feel like you need a desktop environement and graphic user interfaces but if you really want to use that Microslop license you bought it’s fine, you will probably switch in the following months or years. Okay maybe not, some people are fine using it.

You can also take a look at stuff like runtipi, yunohost, CasaOS, ZimaOS, Umbrel, Cloudron and stuff like that. They aim to be beginner friendly self-hosting “OS” or “WebUI”.

Yes selfhosting it is awesome but it’s definitely not the simplest service to do host.