And I feel like it’s not a good idea to have a modem directly attached to the pc directly unless you’re using it as a router?
Yeah I feel like this is the issue. The modem/router would be firewalling between the networks hiding the PC behind it.
Also from the description, does OP have a router at all? Is their ISP somehow just allocating public IPs to everything? Do your IPs start with 192.168 or something else?
I've always wondered, why do we put the GPU drivers and their firmware into the initramfs? Can't we just rely on the framebuffer drivers until the root partition is mounted? Since most of the firmware size is from GPUs, that should reduce initramfs size, and speed up booting as there's less to load into memory.