The folks who show up looking to genuinely learn something, who have a goal to accomplish, I'll gladly help them out. I'll go learn something I don't know yet so I can teach it to them. Willingness to learn is the most respectable thing I can think of. All that "EAUGH Linux isn't user friendly enough" shit is unwillingness to learn. "Why doesn't this perfectly conform to my bad habits?" Because you haven't died in a fire yet. Common mistake for people like you.

Nah, I am more of a single-player kind of person. I was barely any good in my prime 25 years ago and I have only gotten worse since so I stick to mostly RPGs or other action style games.

My newer hardware is circa 2015.

Proton is just Wine under the hood. I even use winetricks with it ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My understanding of that was Facebook just gave up on human moderation and let an AI do whatever it wanted. Still unacceptable but totally foreseeable.

Yes, but also the bit about when someone creates an application without understanding the underlying way that it actually functions. Like I can make a web app, but i don't need to understand memory allocation to do it. The maker of the app is a level or two of abstraction from what the base metal of the computer is being told to do.

The stealing part, my friend. It's the stealing part.