I mean it's roughly 30 years past the "Year of the Linux desktop".

And that's because Windows fanbois moved the goalposts and people either didn't notice or didn't realize what was going on. Back then, "the year of Linux on the desktop" meant the year when Linux was good enough to be used on a desktop as your daily driver, something that's been achieved decades ago. However the Windows lusers started using the term to mean the year that Linux was on the majority of desktops, something that clearly hasn't happened yet and Linux users let them get away with it.

Actually I do want to memorize. But not random idiotic key strokes that have nothing to do with the action/command they execute. EMACS is a prime example for that. ^G for example, what has that to do with "help"? Good, ^H is backspace, so during normal editing not available ...

If you want to memorize the commands, knock yourself out; nobody's stopping you. And go right ahead and use ^H as backspace, as that's what it does in nano. I'm not saying that you must, or even should be using it, I'm explaining why I've been using it for the last quarter of a century.

wine you have to install and setup, while there are tools to help. steam itself install the proton and do the setup...

I use Fedora, so I can only talk about that. With Fedora, Wine is in the standard repos and all you need to do is tell the appropriate package management program (I use dnf, the CLI program, because it gives me the control I want.) to install wine, and away it goes, finding and installing wine and all the needed dependencies without any further work on your part except accepting the transaction. I'd think that most if not all of the mainstream distributions do the same, although the details change, but unless you really want to do it the hard way, there shouldn't be any need to descend into Dependency Hell.

But you don't need to memorize it; all of the most common commands are listed at the bottom of the window. And, if you need one that's not listed, there's always ^G, the first command listed which gets you to Help, a complete list of commands. Nothing to memorize unless you want to.

4. Volunteer for the military in a related field, or even in a general occupation. A two-year military enlistment qualifies for the GI bill which will fund your 4-year degree with perhaps some left over for other education.

The GI Bill is important, but it's not the only thing this gives you that will help you for the rest of your life. You also get VA medical benefits that never end even if you come out without any Service Connected conditions. And, judging by all the complaints about the high costs of Health Care that I see here, it's a good thing to have.

As a personal example, back in early '22 I lost my balance on a patch of black ice and came down on my right knee like a pile driver. That led to two weeks in a hospital and I still have a rod in my femur. As I was already retired at the time there was no way I could have ever paid off that debt, but as I have my VA benefits I ended up not paying for any of that care.

Back when I was first learning Linux, back in the prior millenium, I took one good look at The One True Editor (vi) and knew that I didn't want to waste the time and energy needed to memorize it. Instead, after a little experimentation, I settled on Mork's Editor (nano) and have stuck with it ever since. One of the many things I like about it is that with vi, if you get into it by mistake, it takes you five keystrokes to exit without saving. With nano, if you haven't entered any text, one keystroke (^X, classic geek-speak for Crtl-X) does it. If you've entered some text, but don't want to save it, two keystrokes (^X N) does the trick. As you can see, when working in Linux, KISS is my motto.

Wrong! Just because you started out using a GUI and had a hard time adjusting to a CLI doesn't mean that nobody's comfortable working in a text-based interface. Those of us who were using computers back before GUIs were invented find a command line quite comfortable, TYVM!

Notepad++ just takes the best features of Kate and rolls them into a free Notepad replacement for Windows users so they don't suffer from its eternal failings. We don't need it in Linux, we already have all of its features. Windows users do need a functioning text editor out of the box, which Notepad++ provides as a free add-on instead.

A long time ago, back when you had to go to the Unemployment Office every two weeks to turn in your paperwork and get your check, I was told that by a clerk. So far, I've seen no reason not to believe it, even though I've seen supposedly authoritative claims that it's not true. It's the type of thing the PTB would deny even though it's true.

No, it means that they've lost their jobs and their Unemployment Benefits have run out. The various government agencies responsible for these numbers assume that if you're not receiving government handouts you've left the workforce and they stop counting you as unemployed.

My parents' retirement home was on the flight path that the shuttle used to land at Edwards, and I remember hearing the double BOOM as they went over. Not the loudest thing I've heard. That was my ship's 5"/54 doing shore bombardment while I was topside back in '72. Yes, I was wearing hearing protection but I still have a notch in my hearing range because of it. I also heard the Newport News firing a full broadside of 8" guns one night but that wasn't as loud, both because it was several miles away and because it was firing away from us. It also wasn't using flashless powder, giving us a nice fireworks display as a side effect.

Are you sure that the telescope isn't named after a sandwich?

That could well be a chicken-and-egg problem. Are the buyers buying what's available because it's available, or are the manufacturers making it because the buyers actually asked for it? I'm not aware of any Equinox driver anywhere who ever complained about it not being tall enough (or it being short enough to make it unnecessarily difficult to run over small people) yet Chevy raised the hood anyways.

The other problem is that the auto manufacturers see a distorted picture of car buyers. New cars are too expensive for a large fraction of all drivers; many drivers won't ever buy a brand new car. New car dealers are selling to people with more money, and making decisions around what those more affluent people might want in their cars - or more so are telling such people what they should want.

... I really liked the first Superman they did.

So you managed to find and watch the Superman serial that Columbia put out in 1948. And if you liked that so much, did you hunt down its sequel, Atom Man vs. Superman that came out in 1950? If not, you really should as they used footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing as part of the first chapter's cliffhanger.

I do wonder how much of the bloatware needs to be disabled to actually realize that, though.

There's a very simple way to find out. Just type this one command into a terminal:
systemd-analyze blame