Very informative. Thanks!

For the uninitiated on vendor-supported Linux what's the difference like this and RedHat? I assume they're similar and both competitors to each other. Is this right?

The geek part of me is amazed and very happy that a task as complex as emulation Windows APIs and behaviour have gotten this far. The Wine and Proton projects sponsored by Codeweavers and Valve have made possible to run many Windows software on Linux.
Valve has even made portable console that runs Linux and that is a huge commercial success. That required making most of Windows games work pretty well on Linux which is an astonishing achievement. It also required making a launcher/UI that is easy enough to use to convince gamers to use it

It stands to reason that the majority of changes for a product as complex as Wine would be made by paid-for developers. It's actually the case on many big open-soruce projects. Nothing bad about it. On the contrary: I'm happy that companies contribute code to open-source projects

Yeah, I know iPhones receive support for a long time the problem is that I prefer Android

I certainly wouldn't mind paying a bit of money after say, three years of owning a phone, for software updates. I tend to keep a piece of hardware for a long time if it works and satisfies my needs. My current smartphone (launched in 2020) would fit my needs for a very long time if I can change the battery and the software was reasonably updated (even if it's just security updates)

Nah. Of course it's not as good as iPhones but Xiaomi just updated my 2019 300€ phone to Android 12. Not 13, but I'm not complaining.
Yes, Apple is much better supporting iPhones than most Android manufacturers their own phones but I don't care that much. The upside of Android OS updates being slower is that most apps support pretty old versions of Android. So my 2019 phone can realistically expect to run the latest apps at least until 2025-26

Well, many people might have gone to the US for work but in Europe we get plenty of inmigrants as well. The stricter labor laws probably make our job markets less dynamic than in the US but more protections also has other advantadges.

I don't know. Maybe because it became trendy years ago due to the emergence of touch-screen cellphones and tablets. And now it seems that for any UI to be considered "modern" it has to have ungodly amounts of whitespace. What an annoying trend

I've seen "decline in infant mortality" quoted as the reason that has the more impact in reducing birthrates (by ourworldindata IIRC). Of course women's education and other reasons also have an influence.

Yup. Until new consoles are launched (whether they're named as a new generation or just the "PRO" versions of the current ones does not matter) you could easily do with Nvidia 3xxx class cards.

I don't think game developers kept GPU usage low mainly due to the GPUs being unobtainable in the PC market, I guess they rather did it because the new gen consoles were also hard to obtain and thus there was a big incentive to keep new games compatible with the old gen.
In any case you're right: You don't need the most powerful GPU to run games decently on a PC.

Yeah but bluray discs tend to use a non-optimal bitrate. I don't download much pirated content but even h264 encodes tend to have a much smaller size than the original bluray.
The ~50% improvement comes from people who do comparable encodes (same measured visual quality)

Yeah. I used to buy phones taking into account whether the battery was replaceable. The problem is that almost no one makes those anymore.
Yes, the phone will be a bit larger (not much) but I'm happy to make that tradeoff.
I'm not even much of an environmentalist but I hate waste and throwing away working stuff so even the things that take regular batteries (AA or AAAs) I use them with rechargeables.

Yup, that's what I always wondered every time this has been brought up: What's exactly a robot
It's funny/troubling listening to reporters with little knowledge of tech talk about this: "Robots are coming! We gotta tax the robots before they steall all of our jobs". But they almost always talk about the future robots. There's no awareness at all that automation is a continuum and has been with humans for a couple of centuries now.