imecth
They set the 70$ price point and they set the gamepass price, it's all abstract values that they decide. That's price anchoring at play, you think you're getting a good deal in comparison, so of course you get the gamepass, but no matter which product you buy, microsoft wins.
It's in the article. Each different version you maintain is an additional strain and added cost. It's why applications are increasingly moving towards web versions.
Opening the phone to other app stores is just the first step. The second is letting the user choose an app store when they first start their phone similarly to how they already enforce browser choice.
Yeah... no, they already have access to all that. It's the good ol', if it's gonna happen anyways might as well get behind it and get some good PR.
They also stay pretty current with the kernel and many other packages.
I guess that's better than nothing, that doesn't make it a rolling release though. It's an unstable point release that got half-stuck in the past until they get their cosmic shit together.
Tried the iso in a VM, gnome is still very much on version 42. They obviously abandoned shop to focus all their resources on their shiny new DE.
Hard to recommend a distro that hasn't seen a new release in over 3 years.
Truth is windows has plenty of bugs too, the main difference is that it comes pre installed so you don't have to deal with the install bugs, and you're already acclimated to all its quirks so you don't notice them as much.
As for Mint, it gets recommended a lot because it's stable and looks a lot like windows, but it's old and slow to update to modern standards, you can always go for a more bleeding edge distribution like fedora.
I've installed fedora thrice last year, and each time, I've had to enable rpm fusion in the terminal and download ffmpeg to get youtube to work. This is something that can't be fixed afaik, because it's a copyright issue.
At some point you need start cutting stuff or nothing happens and you're the one still maintaining the 32 bit packages 15 years later.