ForbiddenRoot

Installing arch is a pain

While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It's still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it's certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.

First I’ve heard of that.

It is indeed a new thing. For the reasons you've mentioned this was an option for enterprise customers for earlier versions of Windows as well, but this time they are making the option available to home consumers too. I can't really see too many people paying for this though. Those who care will move on to Windows 11 (or whatever is out there by then) and others will simply keep running an unsupported / not updated OS. In all likelihood, MS will keep providing security updates for the latter for free in the end.

best hope for mainstream adoption

I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).

Gnome is nice of course in it's own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn't a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don't know if that's now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.

Yes, it's called "Mail" and I guess it's the successor to "Outlook Express" from the old days. I have never actually used it though, but it's certainly there.

I thought you were kidding, but then I looked it up on the net and it seems this is really a thing. WTF Microsoft!?

Is this a smart idea?

For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most 'real' games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a "Game Mode" which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).

Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn't work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don't seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There's either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.

Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV's and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.

I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)

Vasco quite frequently blocks the door everywhere for me, but at least I have been able to push my way through so far. He's like my Golden Retriever in that respect so I am used to it from real life.

I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.

The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.

I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.

The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying "two tickets" was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say "deux billets" to produce instant results.

Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P

I’m no huge fan of Windows, but it sounds like you had (No offense) PEBKAC errors.

I think so too and no offense meant to OP as well.

I am an early adopter of all things tech and so I had a Gigabyte Xtreme X670E mobo on pretty much day 1 to go with a 7950X. Everything worked fine on both Windows 11 and Linux despite being a pimped-up mobo and brand new CPU. At this much later date, OP's B650 mobo should be working without a hitch, especially with Windows (and almost certainly with Linux as well).

In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.

In any case, as an old-timer, it's very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the "Year of Linux Desktop" is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.