I assume they said it was due to other reasons than obscurity, although we know better.

Apple always does that. After iAds failed, they pivoted into advertising a privacy focused ad campaign to counter Google. Had iAds succeeded, they'd be perfectly fine into getting into that business.

Same here. I don't know what people that have all these issues are doing, but none of my systems or those of my friends and family have these issues.

We also aren't fucking around with the various random guides to "debloat", mess with telemetry, eetc. however, so I can only assume that it's things in those guides and programs that cause issues. For the people with enough technical knowledge to look for the guides but not enough knowledge to know what they do, or care enough to find out.

The longest update I've had took about 15 minutes. My system never restarts in the middle of use to install updates, with the only exception when I was actively hitting the delay button for several days to see if I could force it to. And it finally did, after several days of it asking and me telling it no, and it still gave me a countdown to save my work. It did not randomly restart while in use without warning.

Programs like candy crush, that had install links that were preinstalled (it's not the full game, just a link to install it) I uninstalled like any regular app and they never returned. I use my system like a regular user, not mucking about blindly in the registry, and never run into these weird issues people complain about. I block telemetry I don't want at the network level. The OS never knows and I don't have to blindly trust random guides telling me to mess with things that aren't intended to be messed with. The OS seems to work just fine with telemetry connections working but failing to connect, as would be expected and tested by MS. People messing with those things manually is not something they'd likely spend much, if any, time on testing.

From my experience, many so-called "power user" complaints are caused by the user doing things they don't understand, outside of what would be expected and tested.

I legitimately haven’t had a windows update take more than 5 minutes during the reboot phase for years.

I wasn't just talking about the reboot phase...

Downloading gigabytes worth of updates, waiting for them to install, rebooting, see more updates, reboot again takes WAY more than 5 minutes.

There is occasional weirdness if you don't powercycle though. In particular, certain KDE updates will make the desktop misbehave until you reboot. I get where you're coming from though. Quick updates and the ability to decide when you want to restart means that I have no qualms about updating frequently.

I am on Arch too and pacman -Syu is usually a snack I have with my morning tea.

Because someone built an easy-to-use solution for organisations to charge money for. The same thing with Cisco VPN that every other software company seems to use.

These vpns seem to be quite a good target since at least the one my university uses is run as a setuid executable, so if there is a vulnerability in there, you can execute code as root that wasn't intended to be executed as root.

Hmmm... Nice, nice, that's nice,

Which university??

As TonyTonyChopper this thread said, sometimes that obscure software is what you are required to use in your institution, or they don't offer support for anything else.

To be fair you should be using wire guard then. Because multiple of the largest and most well-known security auditing firms in the world have said that openvpn is impossible to truly audit. It's too large, you can audit individual parts of it, and you can audit individual interactions between parts. But it's not possible to fully audit.

Meanwhile wireguard is quite small so it can be fairly easily audited by a small team and has been multiple times

Ahhh, wow what a clickbait title then.