From my experience, Microsoft has generally the worst web developers it seems. It's not only the naming, but a lot of their websites work horrible. Teams never even worked in Firefox, say whut?
They didn't delete your account. They deactivated it. It's still worth money to them
Too bad about the choice for qwant. I've been using them for many years and they have big flaws: they block visits from unsupported countries, so if you're traveling, you're fucked. They also started blocking ad blocking users and their main webpage is full of crap that you have to disable manually. Their support is non existing. And they use the same censorship as Microsoft. I moved to brave search recently
Ntfy - no more google reading notifications
Jellyfin - media served without questionable Plex account
Arch - on so many levels allows me a private computing experience
Posteo - simple but efficient email service
Resilio sync - cloudless syncing
Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$
I would argue both have evolved in the opposite way though. Windows has become so unintuitive for me with every version after win 7. Splitting up control panel in many different locations. Multiple methods to remove different applications,... On windows server, it was even worse, and as soon as I moved away from Microsoft's default built-in crap to third party tools, things actually became much easier.
While with Linux, things worked out of the box for me for a long time already and the process of things make sense a lot times, taking into account the requires minimal knowledge is there.
Innovation my ass. Their UI has been as a disaster as ever. Major reason why I stopped paying for their crappy service years ago
I don't get all the noise around AUR being unsafe. Just verify the PKGBUILDS whenever you install or update something.
An opinion so strongly shared by a vast majority is worth being sceptic about.
Another vote for fairphone here, but for reasons others failed to mention: replaceable battery, so even after 2 years, it can feel like new and keep most of its value (to resell if wanted); 5 years of updates + warranty; support for after market roms. Then there's also the fair ethics part of it
I'd discourage you from formatting and using Linux (as a long time Linux user myself). Keep your setup for your education because that's most important. If you can, get another device to install Linux on and learn how to use it that way. It'll also be very beneficial for your career
I might be exaggerating a but I've never been a real fan of Bluetooth headphones or earphones. Sound quality never matched cabled ones (I also have the popular Sony one) and battery life sucks for the time I want to use it