Hmm, well, “works on my computer” is never a helpful comment but I have a heavily modified panel that I moved to the top with no issues.
I’m using the built-in task manager widget rather than a dock. Maybe that’s why?
Mind me asking what distro? And Wayland or X11? Also, which dock?
I’m using Wayland and Fedora (Plasma 6.4) and also had a good experience with NixOS (6.3, also Wayland).
Have you considered using a mesh VPN instead of opening a port to the public? Nebula and TailScale are both great options that have a free tier which is more than enough for most home use cases. With Nebula you can even selfhost your discovery node so nothing is cloud-based, but then you’re back to opening firewall ports again.
Anyway, its going to be more secure than even a properly configured reverse proxy setup and way less hassle.
When’s the last time you tried Plasma? I felt the same way about it as you did until version 6. I’ve been driving it now since 6.2 and its at least as polished as Gnome but with WAY more features and almost infinite customization out of the box.
Hmm, oh well. As long as you found your happy place…