I’m going to be away from home for a few weeks and would like to access my computer (LMDE) while I’m away. Remote desktop connection would be ideal, just file transfer would be acceptable.
Is a VPN necessary, or can port forwarding be good enough for a one time use?
What software/networking recommendations do you have?
Never expose the bare remote control endpoint publicly. For example, recently macOS had a critical vulnerability where an attacker could completely bypass authentication on their Screen Sharing daemon, and the researcher had estimates around 40k publicly exposed systems, and it was found out that the vulnerability was in fact being used in the wild. Exposing things like that publicly is asking for trouble.
Personally I don’t like relying on 3rd party systems like Tailscale, so I just have a WireGuard peer running firewalled to only allow access to what is necessary, though you can skip the firewall part. This obviously assumes you have a routable public IP, i.e. no CGNAT, if that’s not the case Tailscale is probably what you want.