sssd didn’t work well with my company’s AD server, which would cause repeated authentication failures until I restarted sssd. I rigged up a bash script which would restart sssd any time xscreensaver logged an auth fail.

Yes. Microsoft is the king of “good enough” software. DOS was good enough (and had a free C compiler!). Windows gets the job done 95% of the time when it’s not freezing up or needing rebooting. Office is okay - and nothing else is 100% compatible so you get a bonus of vendor lock-in. New features are few and far between, as are bug fixes for non-critical issues.

The only reason to use a Traditional IRA and not a normal brokerage account is so you can backdoor it into a Roth IRA. Since you can't make Roth IRA contributions when you are above a certain income limit, but you can roll over a Traditional IRA into a Roth IRA, this let's you avoid taxes on the growth of the account.