u/Acrobatic_Fennel2542

I have am running the CM4 and really enjoy using only the terminal on the device. Being in the terminal really speeds up the usage because the CM4 is a little lacking in power. But I do have some TUI apps that I like to use and a webbrowser is a must now days. Issue is that it needs a graphics engine for some of them (such as youtube-tui and firefox). I had foot+sway running and working, but I wanted to see if anybody else in the community had a better setup. Sway+Foot felt a little wonky and felt like there was must be a better option. My full setup is this

BYOBU for tmux
Sway+foot for window management and graphic processing
several TUI apps for usage like (subTUI, youtube-tui, xleak, etc)
Web browser

I realize that all of these things are achievable if I just used the GUI and the terminal built into Raspberry PI OS, but being in the terminal forces me to use it. I have loved using the CLI only and I have learned so much terminal already because of this. But I was really wondering if there is a cleaner setup for this. I'm still pretty mediocre at Linux so my terminology is still lacking and my skills are lacking. So I'm sorry if my question seems dumb or uneducated, but I am really liking my UConsole and Linux.

So here is the basic break down. I need to be able to reach my self hosted apps and severs from anywhere.
But I want 2 things a Meshnet (or some other way to managed devices on a locked in network) and a VPN.

I have all my devices always running a VPN for privacy, and any devices that I want to be able to reach hosted apps, they are running a Meshnet. I am aware that VPNs are probably going to be killed off or very restricted due to laws, but I would still like to continue to use them as much as possible.

I can do Cloudflare to reach my apps and VPN on my clients, but then i'm not sure about how private my network traffic is going out of my home server is.

I can do Tailscale for VPN and Meshnet using Mulvad add on, but the Mulvad VPN is terrible, I don't even care about speeds, I just get blocked by so many sites. NordVPN and ProtonVPN don't get blocked by the sites almost ever.

I can do NordVPN and use their Meshnet, but their Meshnet has issues with being blocked by Firewalls if I ever use public or work networks.

I tried a VPS with appbox and setting up an exit node for tailscale on that, but the speeds were terrible even though appbox advertised 10Gbps up and down.

I would prefer to use ProtonVPN which I already pay for.

I'm trying to run just the console on my uconsole to save battery and get better with the terminal. So far I'm doing pretty good and am able to do most of the things I want using TUI apps to use software I couldn't otherwise (Navidrome, YouTube, cyberspace, etc).

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Issue I am having is trying to get my tmux key bindings the way I want. Because "echo $TMUX" return "Linux", there is no terminal emulator running. So keyboard inputs are basically just the raw keys and doesn't allow for combos like Shift+Arrow Key. I tried kbterm, but it refuses to work. And I really don't know any other ways to get around this issue. Could somebody point me in a direction that could help my get a more usable CLI experience?

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The example key combo I am trying to do is

Shift+Left arrow to go to previous window and Shift+Right to go to next window. I want Alt+Tab to pull up window viewer. And other such combos.

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Any tips/tricks?

I just started self hosting my own AI and am just trying a small model qwen3.5:4b on ollama. The issue is that I ask it simple technical questions and I get several minutes of waiting and end up with an answer so long and with new real answer that it is useless. For example, i asked

"Can you give me the commands needed to add a network that isn't currently available to my debian system using the cli? For example, I have a network called homewifi with a password. I am doing this for my pc and it uses nmcli. Give me just the commands, I don't want all the explanation."

I got a response of just what the AI was thinking with now real answer. What am I doing wrong? is this just the growing pains before it really learns more about me and what I am trying to do? I know the question has a bit a vagueness to it, but I wouldn't think it's enough for the AI to just crash out.

I tried again and got an answer, but one that was horribly wrong

sudo nmcli con add type ethernet name homewifi ifname eth0 ip4.addresses <IP-1,2...> dhcp yes connection.password "password" connection.security level strong