Console Gaming is a lot less worse than Nintendo, but if you (or someone else) wants to be 'pure', they are also not recommended. Consoles are locked-down PCs controlled by the companies, not you, and they abuse their captive consumers by charging multiplayer online, having less promotions (and getting worse with time at that, by eliminating the physical disks), demanding subscriptions with ever more grades and higher prices, tying games to a digital account they can revoke, and not letting the users use the hardware as they see fit in general. PC gaming avoids most or all these issues, with steam excelling in everything (sans the digital license tied to the account, but even that is mitigated because their DRM is weak, and games frequently are found on the high seas if needed), and GoG (and itch.io, etc) respecting completely its customers (offline instalers, completely at your control).

It's mostly an aesthetic choice, a choice between desktop environments.

Desktop environment (DE) is just the visual bells and whistles that you use to navigate the PC, like that quick animation when you minimize or maximize a program (Apple loves this), a start menu that has cute icons for each program and turns blue when you pass the mouse over it (or a start menu that is just a raw list of program names), etc.

Mint Cinnamon uses a DE that looks like Windows 7 reborn, Mint XFCE uses a DE that looks like Windows XP reborn, and Mint MATE uses a DE that looks like Windows Vista reborn.

People will tell you that these DEs will have a slight difference in consumption of RAM, where the most 'shiny' DEs will consume more RAM (XFCE<MATE<Cinnamon) by virtue of having more bells and whistles and some different programs that execute the same function, but the difference is irrelevant in practice (unless you are using a 2gb or less PC, where each 50mb of RAM counts). So it's mostly what you fancy to look at. I just like the old-school visual of XFCE.

For managing a library of videogames on the desktop, including integration with all available stores and local installs, there is Playnite for Windows and Lutris for Linux.

It is unintentionally correct: Google Play, and its contents, is corporate malware, people should use F-Droid to get safer and free (as in freedom) apps. Neostore is a nice app to access it.

if they had announced Linux support on release, at least some of that 4% would have enthusiastically hyped it up before and now, and would have played it. Average Linux users are more enthusiastic fans than the average non Linux user for anything that includes Linux, and that niche could have been a good initial support. But it wasnt so.

Free games are also available at PCs (Epic Store every week, FOSS games like 0ad, and sailing the high seas).

That’s the US social reality, there is some little place called ‘rest of the world’, where stuff can be different. I assure you that India and Pakistan and Africa still sell loooads of bootleg DVDs (that will be impossible to give precise numbers), and also that Japan has both still strong rental and collector cultures of boxes of physical media of anime and other audiovisuals (both blu-rays and dvds in that case). Not to mention bureacracy, like archiving stuff for official purposes (police cases, etc) still overwhelmingly done on DVDs. DVDs are still the most predominant physical media by far.

I never experienced any of those problems with Linux Mint (except hardware incompatibility with Mint debian, which they explicit state it's experimental and for enthusiasts). The user experience was sweet from the start, lots of preinstalled useful stuff, an AppStore that already is miles better than Microsoft Store, and my printer was recognized by the pc and printer program better than on my smartphone. Everything has a useful GUI knob to push or click, and i never use the terminal unless i want.

Agree with Manjaro being unstable, that's why no one recommends it as beginner distro, and Pop OS is the distro of System 76 computers, so they also mainly aim for hard and soft wares integration inside they ecosystem (the apple of linux) and people should stop recommending it to beginners.

Linux Mint is the Magnum Opus of desktop linux for me, and we should recommend ONLY it for the time being, as default choice.

There is also Gnome Web (ex Epyphany), a browser that also uses the Webkit engine (as far as i know it's the only 'clone' of Safari cause of this). It's made for Linux (and Unix in general), though i heard somewhere they will make a windows version too. So we can broaden the choice to Chromium, Firefox or Safari.

Well, they actually can, but it is not magic, it might not work everywhere, but it indeed involves going against website demands. There is reader view in firefox (that parses a page and gives text and images), there's ublock-origin that alone blocks so much adds and tracking that webpages load faster, there is ''i dont care about cookies'' (that automatically selects the cookie options on your chosen option), etc, stuff that could be implemented in the browser as options for the user just like privacy settings.

Armchair general here, but if i were to guess israel's plan:

The northern part of Gaza is where the majority of rockets get launched, since they have geographical proximity to several israeli cities from there. IF israel annexes north gaza, that would already be very changing to the military situation. Hamas can obviously launch stuff from south gaza, but the geographical distance to israeli hotspots dramatically increases (by itself an obstacle), AND norh gaza can be transformed into an extended Iron Dome with several military facilities in place to act, not to mention that now Israel only has to watch half the terrain.

The heretofore events point to this possibiliy, since Israel gave the ultimatum to evacuate northern gaza, and south gaza for now seems to be spared from this. Of course, if Israel then eventually proceeds to colonize north gaza with new settlements (aka West Bank 2.0 electric bogaloo) , hamas has a new 'easy' target to hurl stuff into, but the military infrastructure in place will be much more impenetrable, and the local jews would be staunch sionists that accepted the risks and have high morale and preparations to deal with this, and not the mainstream israeli society.

Large library of games is factually incorrect, you just do not know the scale of games in existence. Far more titles in Steam, gog, itch io, and with emulation this all goes to the square power, the largest library of games is a PC.