Not really, since nobody (for values of) ends up actually falsifying it, and if they do, it's years down the line.

> What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?

Geek Squad: 'Sorry, we don't support that.'

Grandma: 'Well, what can you do to help me then?'

Geek Squad: 'We can set you up with a new computer. That'll be $Cost-of-new-computer plus $Cost-of-X-hours-of-setup.'

Grandma (possibility number 1): 'Alright, guess I don't have much choice, and you're the expert.'

Grandma (possibility number 2): 'No thanks. I'll use my phone instead.'

While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.

Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.

Look up 'Fast Startup'. It's a thing since Windows 8. It's a curse onto humanity.

This once really scared me once on a dual boot system. I had “shut down” windows and while using Linux I did some partitioning as I had run out of space on the efi partition which had originally been created by the windows 7 installer. Worked fine for a while until the next time I “booted” windows which appeared to load the partition layout from the hibernated memory which caused a bunch of data corruption

Today is the 11820th of September 1993.

Games with kernel-mode anti-cheat consistently don't work and probably never will (barring them having it removed or made optional). Titles released more recently are more likely to not work simply due to not having had fixes applied to them, although a rather large amount of newer games work fine out of the box if they aren't doing weird stuff. Other than that it's a toss-up, since while it's usually the same few things that prevent games from working properly on Linux, it's not something you as Jonothan S. Gamer will know about unless you go and do research and check ProtonDB and whatnot.

A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.

They're <strong> tags with color:#79635c on hover in the CSS. A really weird style choice for sure, but semantically they aren't meant to be links at all.

I know, I am saying they should be links, as it is what one would expect from an article like this.

They all rely on Google and Chromium's browser engine in the end, so make of that what you will. Firefox (plus its derivatives) and Safari are the only two other options if you want a different browser engine today.

> How about just admitting the things you hate? Then you can just drop it and live a happier life.

These are two very separate things. I hate X. That doesn't mean I hate the few remaining people on there who still post things I wish to see. It's an annoyingly good source of artwork. Many migrated/dualpost to Bluesky, but far from all.

For some similar real world example:s I hate (all?) the local grocery stores and other shops I buy food from. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop buying food from them. I'm not a fan of any of the local electronics shops, but sometimes they're the only choice if I want a local warranty, which I wouldn't get if I imported one. The actually good option in both of these cases simply doesn't exist in the first place, and doing nothing is rarely a desirable option.

> Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console

This is already the case from the Grandma use case, i.e. nothing more than a web browser and maybe Thunderbird and an office program. The terminal issue doesn't come up until you start getting into people who know just enough to be dangerous (myself included).

The larger issue is that computers with Linux pre-installed are (within a rounding error) not a thing, and thus Grandma can't go out and buy one. Telling her to install it on her current computer makes about as much sense to her as asking her to flob the nerfwhizzle. And even if she could, would she place her bets on a (to her) completely new computer system? Not without help or solid recommendations from trusted sources.