Of these, I would say that Cinnamon is one that could be comparable to XFCE or even GNOME and KDE. Seriously, it's good. The system settings menu has all of the options one could need and the look and feel of the dektop is very customizable.
I'm a KDE user, but if it ever stopped working/disappeared I would use Cinnamon. In fact I plan to use it whenever KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable.
I pretty much did this too but in Arch Linux. It's just a script[1] that I run and I have it working with the linux and the linux-lts kernels. It's pretty nifty. It just works on Arch Linux since kernels don't have version numbers on the name I never have to touch again after installation.
I've used Fish for about 2 years now. Before that I used ZSH for about 6 months. I'm relatively new daily driving Linux. About 3 years.
The thing about ZSH that made me jump ship was that even though you can customize it like fish (with Oh My ZSH plugins) ZSH was always slow or didn't display some things correctly. It was frustrating having to wait a few seconds for a command or having things just not work out correctly.
Fish, on the other hand, is fast and has a lot of quality of life features like typing part of a command and then serach with the up key. I didn't even install any plugins (I like to Fisher[1]).
Also, Fish has gotten me more and more into shell scripting. The docs for Fish are very clear and easy to navigate. I love how you can have custom scripts on the .config folder or abbreviations[2], which I think are superior to aliases since they expand into the command you're calling.
I was using it as the default shell for my user until recently and it was fine, but I have gone back to Bash as my default shell and just set my terminal emulator to start into Fish on startup. I didn't have any incident. I just wanted to avoid anything unexpected further down the line.
The thing about Encarta to me is that it felt so much more interactive than what we have today.
Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!) and they were all interactive. I miss this about computers. Not all things have to be a game or passive which is what I see nowadays when a child has a screen in front of their face.
The Guardian had a so-called Concrete Week[1] earlier this year when they published articles related to the concrete industry and its impact.
One of the articles [2] touched briefly on the corruption related to the building and concrete industry.
I assure you, these mafias exist in a lot of places. Odebrecht has entangled governments of Peru and Brazil with corruption here in South America. I would be interested where else has this happened.
What you are saying is no different than any other traditional sport. Take ice hockey goalies. In recent years they've become more athletic to the point that their bodies do things that non-goalies can't. How is that skill relevant or transferable outside of the game? Name a position in any sport and there will be close to zero relevance to the real world.
Even chess, what I consider to be very early precursor of eSports, depends on a narrow set of skills that you can't easily abstract into real life situations.
I'm so glad this people are finally having this conversation.
I will start by saying I'm not a developer of any kind. I'm learning Ruby and I've been doing that for a few months now. However, back in 2015 I got the itch to learn HTML/CSS/JS with the idea of changing careers. Long story short, I tapped out somewhere between 2016 and 2017. I still haven't changed careers. I was stressed and discouraged about how much I had to learn. I'm not saying this is everyone's experience but it was mine and I'm sure I'm not alone. It felt like trying to catch a train that is gaining more speed while crawling.
Hopefully there's a mindset shift after this, although it is my feeling that it will take another 5 years until there's a complete shift in tool set.