I share the same sentiment. Grabbed a laptop last week to be able to wfh somewhere else and entertain myself too, and to try if I couldn’t get gaming to work on Linux, and had that feeling of curiosity back about what is new and how everything works. The feeling was lost sometime after Windows 7, and replaced with a slight feeling of dread about where everything got misplaced in this newest shiniest iteration of Windows.

Couldn’t be happier with fiddling with distros!

I think your third point is key, one thing Microsoft does very well is backwards compatibility. We run programs from the 90s in production. It is a nightmare of APIs layered upon APIs, but the programs will run.

Do you require ad blockers with these? This use case sounds like the intention of the feature, not like the perversion we’re headed for now.