I don’t know how it work for you but not me. Are you sure you lock qbitorrent to the VPN only? Otherwise qbitorrent may just use you normal internet.

New gnome version may cause issue to extensions that do not support it. If that is the issues then there isn’t much you can do.

I recommend GPT4all if you want run locally on your PC. It is super easy.

If you want to run in a separate server. Ollama + some kind of web UI is the best.

Ollama can also be run locally but IMO it take more learning than GUI app like GPT4all.