I dislike Windows as much as the next guy, and recognize this is just a rant. However:

1. Might be more HP's fault than Windows
2. Might be mire Zoom's fault than Windows (though Windows audio is a gongshow)
3. Just use OpenSSH from Command Prompt or Powershell. It should be preinstalled I think but if not can be installed through Programs and Features) in Windows 10 and above.

FYI: If you aren't aware, Arch has a CLI installer now that is very easy to use, should you ever want to give it a try (archinstall)

...What? This is Redis. Linux doesn't really benefit from this (aside from being an OS that can host Redis)

I was mostly being tongue in cheek, but I think it might be possible to launch steam in big picture mode, rendered by Gamescope, from the TUI. No DE required.

Maybe look in the settings. There is a hotkey option to save the last X amount of time (where X can be customized)

Lots of people, often unknowingly. If you run apt install firefox on Ubuntu, you're getting the snap version.

difficult and/or illegal.

I don't think using a VPN gets you out of the illegal part, lol.

...okay, but how is Quest 3 usage not the same as Index usage? I'm not sure the comparison really makes sense.

100%. They're the only ones making a decent rotisserie chicken these days, and it's only $8!?

$10-20 is what that VPS costs at a cloud provider. You could also dockerize and use a container service like GCP Cloud Run combined with cloud storage within that budget.

I'm not a big node guy, but I also kind of doubt nodejs would fail to handle 10RPS on 2gb of memory. I guess it all depends on what the requests are doing.

Average FPS in the benchmarks I'm looking at seem to be 30-35, with 1% lows around 25. Sounds pretty standard for many console games. Especially handheld (switch Zelda games run at 30fps with huge dips, no?)

If you are on Linux and require port forwarding, there is a bit of work that needs to be done.

Otherwise, it's very solid.