Seems to me you're on a good path. Keep it up.
Quazatron
Maybe you should read up on stoicism.
Allowing someone else's action control your actions is a massive waste of time, let alone a great way to attract trouble.
Greybeard here.
I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.
Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you'd find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.
The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.
At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?
Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because 'apt-get dis-upgrade', of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.
I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.
Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because "Linux has no future", "Unix is dying". I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.
Inertia is an immensely powerful force.
You can and should use whatever OS fits your use case. Right tool for the job and all that.
What you should not do is post a clickbait video to trigger the penguins into giving you views.
Upvote for you, dear PUSA fan!
How often are you going to be managing ports?
Just use any tool you like, all they do is fiddle with the Kernel's filter table.
We played Doom on MS DOS. It was hugely popular because it was a breakthrough for PC gaming. So nothing to do with Linux.
I've been using Tidal for a long time, and it has only gotten better.
They recently upgraded all tiers to high quality (better than CD) quality for free.
Meanwhile Spotify still doesn't have the high quality audio tier they promised a few years ago.
The damn thing Just Works™. That's why the developers aren't being pestered. It's a pretty great piece of software.
Every couple of years I install other desktops to check out what the cool guys use nowadays, then go right back to XFCE.
It's like having a hot cup of tea on a cold day while sitting in a comfy chair by the fire with your slippers on.
If it works it ain't stupid. 😄
Tidal. Higher quality audio is the main reason. I got tired of hearing Spotify's muddled compressed sound and waiting for them to release a higher quality plan.