It's a lot better than it used to be, from a Linux perspective. I switched to Mint a few months ago and it can be a bit fiddly, but I haven't had any real issues with any of the games I've tried. Admittedly, that's all through Steam, but still.

This tracks with everything else they've been doing. They don't care about life, they care about control, which this highlights perfectly.

The problem with that argument is that there's value in something being not Facebook/Meta (or Twitter, or another corporate owned and run mega service), but that value isn't as easy to demonstrate as "here's a bunch of shiny features", and once people are locked in, the focus shifts from improving the service to monetizing the service, making it rapidly worse for everyone.

People largely don't think about how the services they use are structured, until any inherent structural issues come back to bite them. Twitter's an obvious example, with people who were dependent on it for their livelihood from a networking/advertisement perspective ending up in trouble when the service went south. Reddit's another example, although how that ends up is still TBD.

If this marks the return of people actually picking up a newspaper (or the digital equivalent), that'd be fantastic. Not holding my breath, but one can hope.

This is what sucked me into the Apple ecosystem in the first place. The first couple of Android devices I had were paperweights within 2-3 years. Shifting to Apple, I've yet to have a device last less than six years.