I'm fairly certain that's the old Debian-based SteamOS from their initial attempt at "Steam Machines"

As far as I can tell, the most common use case for Paint is to take a picture or a map and annotate it with text and some basic shapes. 3D Paint seems to have a "but who is this for" problem. People who just want to draw quick squares and text on things were fine with Paint. (As you said, debugged and slightly improved. Paint's ability to scale photos is atrocious.) People who want to do more will probably find a program that does what they need rather than use the little toy 3D rendering/image editing program that comes with the OS.

I wonder if they asked for payment in gift cards.

Agreed. I've found voice recognitions on phones to be pretty solid, but there are very few things where if I've already got my phone out I'm going to find it more convenient to use the voice assistant. Shouting awkwardly at a cheap SoC in a bespoke plastic shell that's tucked away on a bookshelf in the corner of a room isn't a great user experience.

It also seems like there's a complete mismatch between how companies want people to use voice assistants and how people actually use them. It's always "turn on the ___ room lights" or "play some music" or "set a timer" or "give me information about ___" and stuff like that. (Usually shouted multiple times until the device picks it up correctly.) I have never heard anyone ask their voice assistant to buy them something

Not to say it doesn't happen, of course. It just doesn't seem like there's a multi-billion dollar revenue stream to tap into here.

Yup. Even the developers regarded level 29 as a kill screen since they didn't bother coding the level counter to work correctly past level 29.

Eh? The process for installing Windows hasn't really changed since Vista, though.

1. Select version and/or enter key.
2. Partition drive.
3. Installer unpacks the WIM file into your shiny new partition and installs the bootloader, then reboots system.
4. Windows sets itself up. Drivers present on the install media or available through Windows Update (if you have network access) get installed then it reboots again.
5. OOBE launches.

(And honestly, I'd take the Vista/7 OOBE over the 10/11 OOBE any day.)

I'd imagine the final version of the client that supports Windows 7 will continue working until they find some kind of horrifying security issue that requires breaking old clients to fix or until they add some new feature that isn't worth adding workarounds to keep old clients working. That's usually how it goes with this stuff.

In my case, they were timed exclusives. As it turns out, an exclusive period of one year doesn't work very well when it takes me two years to get a console.

(In my defense, I didn't know it was a timed exclusive at the time. If I had, I would have just waited it out anyway. Lesson learned, do better research.)

For me it's "But now all the games I wanted to play are also on Steam so there's no point."

Those plates are so awful to look at that I never once noticed that they had a website on them.

Then again, Maryland is one of those states that issues awful plates to get you to pay extra for a nice one.

Someone at Google probably realized that people wouldn't wear a device that beamed advertisements directly into their eyeballs 24/7 and they couldn't figure out another way to monetize it.

I don't think there's a roadmap to China taking over Taiwan with a fully functional and intact TSMC. There are enough anti-PRC folks in both the Taiwanese government and TSMC that sabotage would be a major problem. How much damage they'd be able to do would depend on a lot of factors. I'd imagine the EUV lithography machines would be high on the list of things to destroy in the event of an invasion and I doubt ASML would be in any big hurry to sell them new ones. It would take them years to recover. It would be a disaster for everyone on both sides and everyone on both sides knows that.

TSMC isn't the only reason that China wants Taiwan, but it's probably one of the very few things on the list that makes a diplomatic solution preferable to a military one.

They could probably be made to work, but keeping modern internet-connected programs working on older operating systems is surprisingly difficult.

New features get added to OSs all the time even if the base API doesn't change much. New features mean new APIs that aren't supported in older versions. The new APIs tend to enable things people need (better security) or want (enhanced multimedia.) Refusing to use the new stuff will have people asking "why can't your program do X" and using them means you need to stub out or reimplement the features if you want to keep working in older OSs.

Deciding to drop support for an older OS is a business decision, but you can bet it's going to come with a purge of most of the stubs and workarounds that kept it running on older OSs.

(Not to mention that if you go back far enough, you start to run into some really awkward development environment and/or upstream dependency issues.)

I would argue that the Google snippets aren't even a good place to start. I have encountered many instances where the answers they give are just wrong. It's usually related to Google's annoying habit of transparently saying "I couldn't find what you were looking for, so here's something similar that is maybe kind of related." If you search for "When was XYZ released?" and it puts a date in very large text as an authoritative answer, are you going to look down at the snippet below where it says "ABC was released on $DATE..." or are you going to just take the giant-text date plastered on the screen as the answer if it seems right? Do you have faith in your average Google user to do the same?