Hey, now, just because I am an overly paranoid person does not mean that you have to be as well!

Thanks, your comment is an antidote to my paranoia that it is impossible to do anything to address all threats. 😀

Given that your advice is very sound, I have a question: would I gain much by using OpenBSD? The conventional wisdom when I last checked is that it is the most secure unix-like operating system on the planet.

Right, but there is an entire spectrum of plumbing maintenance. I am perfectly capable of plunging toilets, but when a drain fails to work after several attack on my part then it is time to call in the plumber.

I mostly just like building and tinkering with things, and I really like the idea of setting up services that I control that host my own data that I can access from anywhere. I have no real interest in learning about more than the minimum amount needed to do that simply because that is not how I would like to spend my time.

(Lest you continue to have the wrong impression that I am afraid of learning new things: There was a period in my life where I was constantly learning new technologies, programming languages, etc. Eventually I realized that I had demonstrated that I was capable of learning anything that I wanted, and there were so many things out there to learn that I needed to start becoming more selective. At the moment my learning goals tend to be more math focused; currently I am trying to learn graduate-level category theory and measure theory.)

If I really need to master all of the steps that you’ve described before deploying my host on the Internet, then my conclusion is that it is more trouble than it is worth, because my concern is that if I screw up then I will make the Internet a worse place by contributing to botnets.

That does not sound so bad; the parent comment made it sound a lot worse than that.

I admit nothing.

Everything that you mention is sensible, but it seems like it would take so much time not only to set up but to perform the ongoing maintenance you described that it just is not worth the trouble to self-host, which is a significant factor in why I have not taken a shot at it.

You missed the part where the reason why they are doing this is because the person who started XLibre had previously committed so much bad code to XOrg that needed to be rolled back that the git history is now a mess that is hindering forward progress. The goal of the new release is to start over from 2024 and cherry-pick the commits they want to keep in order to clean the history up.