[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]
I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.
In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all.
As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch.
Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.
I was so lucky to land in a CS class where we were writing C++ by hand. I don't think that exists anymore, but it is where I would go in terms of teaching CS from first principles
The hyperbolic "surely a child with a learning disability can't (or shouldn't) go to college!" is very funny post-1950. John Keats wrote the definitive treatise on the subject and nobody read it. The secondary "oh no, rich kids are getting unfair advantages!" argument makes the article somehow worse and less informed. I feel dumber for having read it.
My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic
And the "people actually want worse, cheaper products."
iPhone sales numbers, as an example, say otherwise. If it was universally true that people just want cheap crap, everyone would rush to get whatever $200 budget motorola android the carrier is hawking for "free."
I could seen an argument that people want cheaper products, but certainly not worse. Airlines aren't the best example because margins are pretty low, but food concessions? Insane markup, consumer should expect them to just eat the cost of making a better product for cheaper, they certainly have the margin to do so.
There's a separate Veblen positioning, and Apple own it.
Same with personal matchmakers for high net worth individuals. They charge tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They're not necessarily any better at match making. But the users are paying a lot of money to reassure themselves of their superior status. And to filter out some of the more obvious riffraff.
In fact, a huge driver of practical pricing is narcissism. You're either selling it as a service ("luxury branding") or using it as lever to cynically extract money from those you consider inferiors. (Most corporates.)
Or both.
"More for less" and enshittification are both driven by narcissistic greed and devaluation of customers.
Some businesses start out like this. Some start out with good intentions. But generally once you get past a certain size many businesses become a competitive sociopath farm, with more and more sociopathy the higher you go.
Most internal and external interactions becomes an expression of dysfunctional values where the object of the exercise is to assert superior status and power and to deny quality service.
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