I'm just curious as I've permanently dedicated my laptop to torrenting. I've been too nervous to install anything but the VPN and Firefox on it. Now, I'm curious to mess around with Linux some more, which is what I use on it, but I can't fully test out what all I can do with it without signing into accounts.
Do you use your torrent machine to do other things besides torrenting, signing into personal accounts and stuff?
Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).
My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.
Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins. Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc. More importantly, what is the distro you're using? Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder) One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I'm more of a non data sharing freak.
I have a dedicated machine that torrents and seeds 24/7 but for some random thing I use my main pc
I use a wyse terminal as a torrent downloader and samba server. I stored documents, including my CV on there until recently but started thinking that might be a bad idea. So now I sync those documents between my devices using Syncthing and will soon be installing Jellyfin on that wyse terminal.
I use an optiplex for torrenting, Plex media server, and real debrid. The VPN is always on so I wouldn't be concerned to use it as my daily driver but it's a bit old to handle other tasks in use my daily driver for.