Linux will install compatibility versions of libraries if you try to install software that requires them, as they will be pulled in as dependencies by the package manager.

For a desktop it's easier as you just need 2 things:

Your $HOME
Your list of installed packages

Running as a user, you can't put files outside of your homedir anyway (Aside from /tmp which you can afford to lose)...

For a server it's different because each service has its own location for config and data, but if your job is to setup and manage the server then you should know what its running and where those services keep their data.

If users are expected to know a lot about an extremely complex system in order to use it, then that system isn't suitable for those users...
This is the complaint often made against Linux, but it requires considerably less knowledge to configure and maintain a Linux system.
That said, most people would be better off with consoles, ipads and chromebooks.

That might work in a corporate environment, assuming you go to the effort of pushing out the updates centrally (which 99% of places don't), but thats not practical for individual users outside of a managed network as they have no other way to update their application software short of doing it manually.

Leaving all those applications without updates (which often happens in corporate environments too because the stock windows update tools don't handle third party updates very well) results in systems getting hacked on a regular basis and most places *solution* to this is to install various endpoint security applications which cause even more performance loss than the background updaters would have.

Yes Windows is one giant clusterfuck, it's simply not suitable for use by non technical users.

While it's true that having crap running in the background will slow down any OS, it's only Windows that is generally plagued with things like this... Most Linux applications install and update through the package manager so they don't need their own background updater process running. And for the few things that do need to perform background actions, they generally hook into the crontab rather than running their own persistent process.

Linux also tends to keep applications and their configuration separate, whereas Windows has a centralised registry, which results in application configurations being loaded into memory and processed even when those applications are not being used.

Similarly Windows relies on individual applications to provide their own uninstall process while Linux handles that consistently and thoroughly through the package manager, Windows uninstallers often fail to fully remove files and registry entries, leaving behind cruft which accumulates over time.

Something like raytracing is unlikely to be affected so much, as it's CPU bound and Windows tends to choke the IO systems (hence why someone suggested an SSD)... Plus you're probably not using your render farm hosts for anything else so far less cruft is accumulating on them.

Plus Windows is a far more complex system than Unix, it's almost impossible to understand inside out what's actually going on... The less you understand the system, the less you can keep it under control.

So yes, much of the slowdown is the fault of windows, which is why although such problems could technically plague other systems they generally don't.

But not hard to connect your phone to a charger while you drive, most cars have accessory sockets these days or even direct USB connectors for charging phones.

There is no such thing as "a certain audience"..
If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.

Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.

If you want to charge someone to view your content, then you should do so in a non discriminatory way - ie anyone can view it and for the same price (external factors like taxes, shipping costs notwithstanding). Anything else should be illegal.

The other difference in many countries is that you aren't protected by employment laws which make it very difficult to get rid of employees... You contract can be terminated at any time, whereas firing an employee requires that they've done something seriously wrong.

If you want to pay someone 100k to work 50 hours, then specify 50 hours in the contract...
If your contracted for 40 hours and you work 60 then you're skewing the stats and making it difficult for the company to keep track of hours budgeted for a given task. If the company needs more man-hours to do a given task than they have paid for, then they really need to either be employing more staff or improving the efficiency of those they already have. Having staff work longer hours results in diminishing returns as people get tired and angry, even 40 hours is too long for many jobs and just results in people taking many breaks during the day.

What's the reasoning behind not paying overtime for someone on more than 80k? Are you assuming that they won't do any overtime, or are you expecting them to work extra hours for free?
I would always avoid any contract where the hours were not specified up front... If the company can arbitrarily demand that you work extra hours then it makes it difficult to have any kind of social life. You can't exactly make plans when you could be forced to cancel them and work instead.

Overtime should always be both optional and compensated... I certainly wouldn't want to give up my weekends and evenings for free, nor would i want to cancel important personal plans for work (this would likely result in divorce). Not to mention that if your time becomes a free resource to the company, then they have an incentive to take as much of it as they can especially when you have incompetent management who treat their staff as machines - more uptime = more work.

Very true, but employers are often greedy and treat their employees like robots...
Most people's optimal concentration span is relatively short, so anything that isn't ridiculously mundane can only be done efficiently for a few hours and regular breaks are needed... Even mundane work that doesn't require much thought will suffer from longer hours, as people will get tired and make more mistakes.
And ofcourse overworked, unhappy resentful employees won't expend any more than minimum effort.

I've seen many employers institute highly unpopular policies in an aim to increase output, only for it to have the opposite effect. Ofcourse then they blame the staff and never even consider that their own policies were the cause.

Only, they should have started working on it slowly one department at a time a few years ago...
They will probably end up finishing the migration to something else just before that too becomes unsupported and they're back in the same boat.

Spammers will find other ways to host their sites, like compromised boxes...
Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.

A cheap VPS plus a domain name would also be more than adequate for hosting your own email, or even a low power ARM based machine running at home on the end of your DSL assuming you have a static ip and an ISP that doesn't filter SMTP traffic.

As for spam filtering, a filter that's dedicted to you will usually be more effective too as it can learn about the email *You* typically receive... A lot of spam is sent around in languages like russian and chinese, but if you can't read these languages then chances are you will never receive any legitimate email written in these languages... A major email provider cannot block entire languages because they might have customers who speak those languages, but a mail server dedicated to one person can easily and reasonably do so.

Security is expensive, hardware is cheap.
You can buy from vendors who are used to dealing with clients holding confidential data, and expect them to handle returns or swallow the cost of replacements without returning the dead ones. It all depends on the contract between you and the supplier.

Or you can simply not return faulty drives, just replace them and then destroy the faulty ones.
Many places will stress test the drives for a while before putting live data on them, most drives that will fail during their useful lifespan will do so early on and can be returned at this point because they don't have any worthwhile data on them yet. Drives that fail after a few years are worthless anyway, and will just be replaced with newer higher capacity drives.

The overhead of encryption means inferior performance, higher cpu utilisation, overhead of key management, cost of dedicated crypto hardware etc... This will often outweigh the cost of a couple of extra drives should some fail.