God damned broc-top! There are so many other options that are less conventional! You have total freedom to choose any flavour but pick 'fair trade vanilla.'
At 35 I continue to wear home made stenciled t-shirts and jeans I cut into shorts. If my boss doesn't like it he can go break a hip about it, how I look has no bearing on how well I do my job.
They could easily set up a permanent library of ALL previous titles for sale along with emulators for each new console they release. Nintendo could re-sell you every game they have ever made every time they drop new hardware, but nope, just a big fuck you.
I was about 16 and made a Slax CD to get around my schools locked down WinNT/XP installs. After school I ran Ubuntu on an '06 Acer laptop for a while but later switched to W7 for gaming. When W10 launched with ads in the start menu I moved to Debian and have been totally happy since then.
As of W10 I stopped trusting Windows. Having ads bundled into a >$200 OS shows me that being an OS is no longer the primary goal.
Previous to that I had been using Debian as a media server so the switch was pretty painless. I can play 90% of my Steam library on Linux, edit photos, edit videos, stream, browse, and do literally everything I used to do on Windows.
If you use strong passwords and keep an eye on your logs you are no less safe than any other public facing entity. I've had a bunch of services exposed since 2020 so far no one has even bothered to brute the basic auth on Apache (though bot nets take a run at SSH a few times a year).
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
Python is easy to pick up but it is very different from Java/C/C++ so it may or may not help you in understanding other people's work. If you are just messing around I would recommend looking at Python, Processing.org (Java) and Arduino(C++). If you can solve the same simple problems with all three you will be set for most anything (and you get to play around with Arduinos).
There is no such thing as a private chat on a platform you do not own. And even if you DO own the platform it is only as private as the participants decide it to be. Hopefully people start to realize this before complete non-privacy becomes the accepted norm.
Fixed your code :D