Genuinely worried about that when Gabe passes the torch. I’m glad most of their Linux work is going back to the commons and to open source tools so even if they do become shit we’ll still have decent compatibility.

Yes it’s indirect, but remember that Microsoft is one of their biggest competitors. This isn’t about seeing absolute profit from every change, it’s about improving linux as a platform to make it more viable for consumers, which will make it more viable for developers, which pushes more people to Steam and SteamOS as their first Linux distro and first destination for games. By making the platform perform extremely well on older/cheaper hardware they also create a market for other businesses to create hardware (Legion Go for example) which will increase the PC market and increase the number of people using steam since it’s the defacto monopoly. Yes, they won’t necessarily get every penny from every sale of hardware or even games since other game stores exist, but they will get a huge percentage from the majority of people in the PC market.

What business purpose does it serve to continually improve their product? Hmm. Gee. Hmmmmmmm. Geeeeeeeeee. I’m stumped.

Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.