Adding to the discussion, if you want to watch anything that’s not mainstream (i.e. non-western, or arthouse), you’re basically supposed to either wait for it to stream on Mubi or get a Blu-ray/DVD (that are often out of circulation if it’s more than 5 years old). So the only real option is pirating.
When was that last time? In the last 5 years, except for brand new graphics cards, I’ve never had any hardware that didn’t simply work out of the box.
And for the first question, it works much better and breaks less often (these memes exaggerate for comedic effect, usually it’s rock solid), has much greater privacy, and it’s free.
Games are one of the very few things that I always pay for. Steam is mostly responsible for that. Also, music. But nowadays I do store some of my own music because I can have lossless that way.
You’re making this way more complicated than it actually is. The guy definitely can give estimates for when he parked the bike and when he found out that it was stolen. It’s not that complicated.
I’m kinda in the same boat, except for a specific private tracker. It’s a local private tracker which has a ton of exclusive stuff in my native language, and most of the users also speak it so there’s a communal aspect to it. But otherwise, yeah. I also tend to prefer public trackers, especially for more mainstream stuff.
For a total newbie, Linux Mint or PopOS are probably the best options. But EndeavourOS is getting there. There shouldn’t be any issues during the installation if one sticks to the defaults. Only thing is, it doesn’t come with a graphical package manager out of the box. But once that is installed (I think anyone will be happy to write a single terminal command, at least), I don’t see why it’s any harder to use than any other distro.