A VPN is easy to setup (and I have it setup by the way), but no VPN is even easier. SSH by itself is sufficiently secure if you keep it up to date with a sane configuration. Bots poking at my ssh port is not something that bother me at all, and not part of any attack vector I want to be secure against.
Out of all the services I expose to the clear web, SSH is probably the one I trust the most.
Weight your words my friend! GNU’s a behemoth !
GCC alone is almost as big as Linux. Add core/binutils, the Hurd, … And you easily outclass the kernel itself !
~ $ du -sh linux-6.4.12/ gcc-13.2.0/ 1.5G linux-6.4.12/ 1.1G gcc-13.2.0/
Oh, and Emacs.