They will make it worse because the driver at least has an incentive for his vehicle to be clean. A robot taxi doesn't care if the previous passenger vomited in the seat.

This. Get a type-C dock so you only have a single cable to plug in when you set the laptop down.
These docks typically come with multiple A/C ports, monitor connections, ethernet, power for the laptop, extra storage (automated backups whenever you're at your desk etc).

The USB stick can be wiped and reused for something else.
USB sticks, or SD cards etc are not very expensive.
The optical media might be cheaper, but the combination of media and drive is not, plus to get a good price on media you usually need to buy a spindle. Unless your regularly using optical media for other purposes, it's actually a lot more expensive for a one off installation.

That's exactly what any consumer router or firewall does by default.
Your ID suggests you might have been around long enough to remember when legacy IP was used in this way too - with proper routable address space on both sides of the firewall. That's exactly how a firewall is designed to work, NAT is just extra complexity that introduces new problems.

With routable space both sides it's easy to verify your firewall configuration works as intended.
With non routable space behind you're relying on the upstream not to pass packets to you with the non routable address as destination. Typically this won't happen because the ISP's router won't know to route traffic for that block via your router. But what if such traffic does arrive on the WAN port of your router?
Unless explicitly configured to drop it, most devices will dutifully route it inside.

You think this can't happen? It can. Many ISPs put their customers into a shared WAN subnet so the other customers are layer 2 adjacent and can absolutely send packets to your router with an internal destination address. Have you tested this scenario? Just one of the many ways complexity is added.

It's not "too complex", it works the same as legacy IP did just with a larger address space. You only think it's too complex because you've never bothered to learn about it properly.

In fact, once you add in all the kludges used to keep legacy ip limping along (nat, address overlaps, misuse of reserved or squatted address space, address recycling etc etc etc) then IPv6 is actually much simpler.

What ISP gives you a subnettable allocation of legacy ip for home use?

The standard for a v6 home allocation is /56 (see: https://www.ripe.net/publicati...) which lets you create 256 standard /64 subnets. If you get anything less you have a lousy ISP.

If you don't have any choice of ISP then legacy IP is one of the reasons - any new provider would be forced to pay a lot of money for legacy space, and pay a lot more to implement CGNAT while providing inferior service to customers.

If you don't have a subnettable allocation then you need to resort to kludges like NAT, which you're almost certainly doing for legacy traffic already. Yes v6 should be better, but even in a worst case it's not any worse.

Also a lot of users apply legacy thinking and assume the v6 allocation on the WAN interface is all you get. This is generally true for legacy IP because you're only given a single address on the WAN port and expected to NAT. With v6 you still get a single address on the WAN port but you're expected to use prefix delegation to get a separate subnet for use behind your router. Yes your router can actually be a router and not a glorified proxy with NAT.
Legacy IP actually works the same way, but typically only large businesses can afford enough address space to be able to route and subnet it properly.

CGNAT is far more widely used in developing countries, as noted in the article.
In developed countries there tend to be long established providers that got large early pools of legacy address space and don't need CGNAT.
New providers would be forced to use CGNAT, so this stifles competition and is one of the reasons many americans have no choice of provider.
A lot of the content providers and CDNs are based in these developed countries and still cling to this assumption because they have never had to experience the headaches of CGNAT themselves.

Piling on top more and more kludges and complexity is not the answer, that just makes the house of cards more expensive, complex and unstable. The answer is to use IPv6 and ditch legacy IP.

Over here the ISP is already dual stack, with CGNAT for legacy traffic. I have the "ipvfoo" browser extension and in 99% of cases if i see a captcha popup it's because the site doesn't publish AAAA records. Sites which are accessed over IPv6 almost never have that problem.
This is especially stupid when using a provider like cloudflare, because they provide v6 for free. And slashdot is especially guilty of this, not publishing the AAAA records despite using cloudflare.
This is another symptom of short sightedness - managed from a developed country where they use an incumbent ISP that's not using CGNAT so they don't see the problems others will be forced to deal with.

Legacy IP was an experimental military network that is now a hideous collection of kludges and duct tape.
IPv6 is the production ready version intended for a global public network.

HP had 2x class A after their acquisition of DEC, i'm not aware of anyone else having larger than that.

This is a totally broken setup, unless your applying legacy thinking to it and don't understand how it works. The /64 you get on the WAN interface is just for the router, and you typically need to use prefix delegation to get a second prefix (which should be a /56 for home use) that is then routed behind your router and entirely under your control.
Yes with v6 your router actually gets to be a router, not a glorified proxy with NAT.

Because of the shortage of legacy IP, any new or expanding provider has no option but to use CGNAT or charge a _LOT_ more for service.
People complain about a lack of competition - this is one of the reasons why.
In some countries there are no non-CGNAT consumer options. Even business plans are behind CGNAT unless you pay significantly more.

You should be using IPv6 for everything - that way you can ssh direct to multiple devices instead of having to use nonstandard ports or go through a jump server, and you will face far less brute force attacks against your ssh services because bots won't be able to find them in the large address space.
All mobile operators in the US support v6, so you will have access from everywhere. If you encounter a legacy network you can use something like cloudflare warp as a VPN, as well as complaining whenever you encounter such an outdated network.

Once everything uses v6 this problem simply goes away, but a lot of people aren't aware of it and don't bother to deploy it. User awareness needs to increase or things are just going to get worse.

No it's not, and there's a reason the media industry is not pushing for IPv6.

Widespread NAT breaks p2p, as users stuck behind NAT cannot peer with each other. This turns decentralised protocols like bittorrent, back into centralised systems with dedicated seed boxes. It's much easier to target a small handful of seed boxes than individual users spread all around the world.

MPAA/RIAA absolutely want widespread NAT and do not want IPv6 because this turns the decentralized and hard to control internet into a centralized client-server model where a few big players control all the servers.

NAT also does not prevent identification of the individual user, it just makes it far more expensive for the ISP to do so. ISPs are still able to identify users and regularly do so, they are required by law incase of serious offenses like uploading terrorism related content. What this means is that instead of keeping track of "IP X was allocated to customer Y from $datetime to $datetime" they now have to log every state tracked by the NAT gateway. This generates huge amounts of data which is costly to store.
UK based telco EE presented a few years ago how much they saved (multiple millions per year) by enabling IPv6, most of which was NAT costs.
Also since ISPs are forced to collect all this data anyway, they will seek ways to recover the costs or even profit from it. This can range from passing the cost directly to the consumer via higher prices, or monetizing the data collected in various ways.

Many users would need to buy new hardware in order to run windows 11, and 11 breaks compatibility with some things that worked in 10.
Also newer games will probably not be compatible with 10 in the future.
SteamOS will run on their current hardware, and continue to do so in the future. Compatibility with existing games varies and could go either way, compatibility in the future is likely to be better as new games drop support for 10 and proton is under active development.

Older games often don't work on current versions of windows either.

I'm not sure "full compatibility with all games and services" applies to windows either, there are all kinds of problems especially with older games.

Exactly this, knowing where the code came from to avoid copyright violations or malicious code. The vast majority of people should only ever be running code from verified reputable sources.

They won't make worse products specifically for the UK, but they will make worse products for the rest of the world which will also be sold in the UK.
Even down to the plugs - UK plugs are used in Malaysia and Singapore too.

China makes a range of products, but what's sold in western countries has to comply with relevant local safety standards. They make much cheaper (and often far more dangerous) products which are sold in countries with lax regulations like Myanmar, Laos etc.