I'm an absolute security nubile who wants to access his Windows desktop PC from his Mac laptop. I'd like to do this so I have all of my stuff in one place, and I also have some work documents stored on my personal PC that I'd like to access from the road. I discovered Microsoft RDP and thought it might fit the task, but I'm concerned about security implications, and some of my work documents being exposed to malicious do-no-gooders. I've made some changes to my RDP setup after a bit of searching, such as changing the RDP port to a random number, requiring authentication using NLA, and requiring SSL for incoming connections. I've also set up Duo TFA to be required on all RDP connections.

My question is, if i set up port forwarding and expose myself to the internet, is this still a really bad idea? What other alternatives do I have? I did a bit of research on VPNs, but I couldn't really make sense of it all. I'd really appreciate your advise. 

End-to-end is where the message is encrypted by the sender and decrypted by the receiver. Nobody in the middle, not the chat provider nor other entities have the ability to decrypt it.
Compare this to a simple chat over HTTPS. Each message is encrypted in transit, just based on the fact that TLS is used. Now, while the intended recipient is another user, the TLS connection is initiated with a server (think Facebook). TLS terminates at the server, and whoever controls the server has the ability to view the messages since they are not encrypted end-to-end. Then, the message may be passed on encrypted over TLS again to the recipient.
The key difference is that the provider is able to view the messages in this case.
