it’s basically the server that decides if it trusts the judgment of the client or not. Can’t wait to see that cat-and-mouse game going on

This is partially correct. The server will check that you have a valid token issued by a trusted third party, who will almost certainly be Google, Microsoft, or Apple. When you connect to the web page, your browser will give this token to the server and say “hey look I’m legit.” The token will have enough information on it to identify that it is relevant (being provided by a client that matches the hardware it is meant to verify) as well as a cryptographic signature that verifies it is in fact from the trusted third party. So it’s less the server trusting the judgement of the client than it is the server trusting the judgement of whatever third party is attesting to your system.

$65CAD for 300Mbit fiber. Just clocked it with a speed test at 350/480, which is weird. I don’t really trust any speed tests though. Worst part is that we reliably lose connection every time it rains heavily. Brought it up with the ISP and they have just blown me off so far.

The problem is that Microsoft is in a position to push Teams in an unfair way. They bundle it with other software that their clients will already be using, thus making it the most convenient choice. Convenience is a huge deciding factor in what an organization adopts, since supporting a single software bundle can be much easier than many disparate ones. Leveraging your existing market share in an unrelated domain to edge out competitors in another is exactly why antitrust legislation exists.

Totally proper use of the law.

It baffles me that companies the size of Microsoft can’t nail UX. They have nigh-unlimited resources and just can’t get software to work well in an environment that they themselves designed. I get that they will put the minimum amount of work into a product, so long as it’s achieving it’s goals, but companies this size have zero excuses for an app that doesn’t work flawlessly.

This is heavily influenced by choice of DE. Some of them really do have all their options well laid out in the system settings, but others rely entirely on config files. I have little experience with GNOME, but with KDE I was able to customize my experience very heavily using only the system settings by just playing around in the GUI. Meanwhile, on another machine running Hyprland, I have had to read a lot of documentation in order to customize it, but the available options are relatively more powerful than the KDE setup.

Neither of these methods are more right than the other, but one is absolutely more new-user friendly, assuming they do not want to simply accept the defaults.

This is harder than it first appears. Microsoft actually subsidizes vendors for selling machines with Windows installed. So these cheap laptops would actually be a bit more expensive without the Windows installation.