I've had the same problems with windows, wireless or even ethernet not working out of the box and having to hunt around for drivers (and they don't even make it easy to work out what chipset your card has)... Usually this is down to windows being much older than the hardware and having no drivers for it by default, and its often possible to boot a much newer linux livecd and use it to download the drivers.

Setting up windows is not easy either, in many cases its more difficult than linux. The only difference is that windows usually comes preinstalled, and with a recovery partition that is configured for that specific hardware. If they supplied hardware preconfigured with linux there wouldn't be any issues.

Assuming the tank is capable of receiving the signal... Defeating such a system could be as simple as wrapping the antenna in tin foil. If the tank requires a signal to operate at all, then the enemy would just invest in signal jamming equipment.
DRM schemes are inherently ineffective, and often cause more trouble for the legitimate users...
The best thing they can realistically do, is have a very comprehensive understanding of the weapons weaknesses, and deploy appropriate countermeasures against them.

And if you have open source drivers that continue working and the upgrades are free, what possible reason do you have for not upgrading?
The userland ABI and APIs are stable and have been for a long time, code written for unix systems of the 80s will still compile and run just fine on a modern linux system.
Windows users stick with the version they got because upgrades are expensive, often cause performance degradation or require a troublesome clean reinstall, and may break compatibility with existing hardware or software.
The only time problems like that occur on linux is with closed source software, none of which i use... I regularly upgrade my linux boxes for free to get new features or other improvements, and the upgrades are gradual so you can get used to changes rather than a hard slap in the face every 5 years or so.

I continue using my "obsolete hardware" because it still works and still serves my needs, I could buy a new replacement but it would cost money and wouldn't serve my needs any better. Your argument against using obsolete hardware also applies to obsolete software, windows users keep using the version they got with the hardware because any benefits are outweighed by the negatives of upgrading.

No, you can't...
Support for legacy hardware is often very poor with windows... the driver model has changed a few times, and each time cuts off some older hardware.
Then there is the issue that most drivers come as binaries, so while a piece of hardware may have 32bit drivers it may not have 64bit ones, and is even less likely to have arm drivers.
Then there are niche devices that were never intended to be used with windows, sun ethernet cards for instance that were intended to be used on sparc servers actually run just fine in x86 systems on linux but windows has no drivers for them.

I have an old usb scanner here, current versions of ubuntu detect it out of the box but you need to install drivers on windows or macos, only the windows drivers are only for 32bit xp and the mac drivers are only for powerpc.

Far too many people are doing exactly this...
Smaller companies often have old desktops running as their "servers", no raid (or using the crappy bios fakeraid), no backups, no redundancy etc. Lots of cheaper servers are also based on desktop boards, and lots of budget hosting companies use such systems.

I would generally go for Intel boards as Intel stuff is generally well supported by Linux...
Otherwise i would go for higher end boards aimed at servers or highend workstations - while manufacturers of cheap desktops generally ignore Linux, manufacturers of servers definitely can't and will ensure their boards contain appropriate components.

European servers owned and managed by a US company. While there may be local employees in the EU, they are ultimately answerable to more senior US based employees within their own company and therefore to US law.

That assumes that the US division of Deutsche Bank actually has access to the banking records of German citizens. If the chain of command is set up correctly within the company, then the US division should be unable to get access to German records without the agreement of someone sufficiently senior in Germany.

Employees located in a different country would not be subject to the laws, but they are still subject to the hierarchy of their own business - that is if their boss is located in the US and compelled by US law to do something, the less senior employee would also be so compelled not directly by US law, but by the internal rules of the company.

The data belongs to a US company, and is on servers which US based employees have access to. Those employees are beholden to US laws, and should retrieve the data if directed to do so by a US court.
Also the Irish company is a subsidiary of the US company. The Irish employees don't have to obey US law, but they do have to obey their bosses who in turn do have to obey US law.
So long as the data is stored on servers operated by an organisation which has a chain of command extending upwards in the US, they are beholden to the demands of the US government. The opposite probably wouldn't apply, as the Irish employees wouldn't have seniority over the US and thus couldn't compel them to do anything.

If they don't like it, the Irish part could be spun off as an entirely separate entity free of US control.

Linux support for MIPS is actually pretty good, and has been around at least as long as ARM support if not longer... The rest of the toolchain, like gcc etc also has good MIPS support. There is already 64bit MIPS support in the Linux kernel and has been for a long time too, MIPS is actually one of the oldest 64bit architectures out there.
MIPS would actually be better off focusing on this, as they have a good head start on ARM when it comes to 64bit and multiprocessing. I used to have a 24 cpu (discrete cpus, not cores) 64bit MIPS years ago in the form of an SGI Onyx.

They should be required to actually pick up the leaves and dispose of them, rather than just blowing them around...
There seems to be a constant battle here whereby someone will hire a gardener who will blow the leaves off their front lawn, mostly onto the adjacent properties or onto the road. A few days later, those adjacent properties hire gardeners who blow them all back.

Most washers have a delay start option...
So if you work 9-17, and your wash cycle takes 2.5 hours you schedule it to start at 14:30 and it will be just finished by the time you get home. If you have 4 loads to do a week, then you just run it all but one weekday. Plus if you spread your 4 wash loads out over the week rather than waiting until a specific laundry day you won't get such a large buildup of dirty clothes.

In the EU, 240V outlets are the standard not anything special. Generally appliances (at least in the UK) have up to a 13A fuse in them, and you may have a higher capacity hard wired circuit for the stove (the dryer is almost always just plugged into a standard wall outlet).

Or they could just turn off the tower? That gives them the added benefit of deniability, they could claim the tower suffered a power outage or other technical fault.