No problem getting out, MS keeps Windows broken.

No, cops jailed her!
AI can’t put handcuffs on a person.
It can’t even make a decision.
Stop deflecting the blame.

Time to distro-hop!

I hope this rant helped you vent your frustration.
Admittedly, “You can game on Linux without issues” is bending the truth. That’s limited to Steam. Outside of Steam games, especially with cracked and modded games, you’re in “might work” and “might need various amounts of fiddling” territory.
That doesn’t mean Linux is trash, it’s an awesome OS, just not the right one for your use case.

A cat in the bag

All Linux distros keep updating every year.

I use Fossify. Works like a treat but you need a third party online account for CalDAV sharing. And I agree seeing it up was a bit weird.

The feeling of being a hacker who outsmarted a huge corporation, after activating Windows 95 with the FCKGW license key (I was 12).

That’s in Firefox at least, but you have to turn it on in the settings.

Checking for hdd errors (and fixing them) is done automatically in regular intervals during boot by fsck.
Smartmontools can give you all info you need on hdd health.
And disk encryption is handled by LUKS. In all major user-friendly distros (Mint, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite, …) this can be set up in the graphical installer by clicking a checkbox.
To encrypt a hard drive after installation, there are graphical frontends (KDE partition manager and Gnome Disc Utility).

What does this software do, specifically?

I can’t enjoy porn if the acting or the story is shit. Or when the “step son/daughter” is older than the “step mom/dad”.
So I specifically look for porn actors that do it right.

Fun fact: That was almost exactly the time frame where the Berlin Senate was lead by the conservative CDU (who, within the same time frame, never got tired of slandering their Green opposition as the “pedophile party”)

Maybe my experience is outdated. I had about a 20% success rate in getting Windows executables running in Wine without fiddling.
So for a while now I only game via the Steam client, since I don’t pirate or mod games anymore.
Maybe things have improved in recent years, I wouldn’t know.

Unless you rely on pirated/cracked games, CAD or Adobe software, Linux will be a massive improvement to your computing experience.

INFO Were they brown?

Hell, let’s go one step further and force it on the user level:
Every time you want to access an online service, a government-appointed doctor comes to your house and does an X-ray of your clavicle to determine bone ossification, dental examinations, and a DNA methylation test to determine your biological age.

our local leftist third space.

You have no idea how jealous I am.

We will never see another Stranger Than Fiction, or Dead Poets Society or, Eternal Sunshine

Original movies like that are still being made, much much more than ever before.

Just not in Hollywood. And you won’t get a trailer for those movies fed to you by Youtube’s algorithm, you have to look for them yourself.

My recent favorites were Flow and The Outrun (both from 2024).

Edit: Using this comment to plug one of my favorite original movies of all time:
The Guard (2011)
(The first 2 minutes set the tone of the movie well)

Why is Ryan Gosling in this meme?