Something that comes to mind for me is the old Bill Gates trustworthy computing memo [0], from the era when early windows xp was getting flak for poor security. That was supposedly the turning point where they started those overhauls towards service pack 2 and likewise added a security focus in other products, and they decided they couldn't sneak in easter egg flight simulators into excel any more because it just added opportunities for flaws.
What stands out to me is the organization needs to be accept that change is needed and 'walk the walk', and also that those efforts take time. I've no idea what things are in motion in MS, but I wonder how quickly they can turn the ship, how much momentum is in their current direction and how much force is in turning. Moving the taskbar seems like addressing a loud persistent talking point, but it's one among many. What's the timeline (even though windows version timing seems like 'when they need branding')? Win12? Win13?
Even then with cards they may still need to consider fraud via skimmers, or that the equipment can be vandalized. Going app-only (or vastly reducing the availability of payment machines) means less upkeep for them, but it also moves the kind of fraud to where people have replaced the information or QR codes to scan. It seems like a parallel to what google and whatever entities are pushing them to make these changes are trying to do, at some point someone has to put in work to keep the system working securely and everyone wants to delegate it to someone else.
It's interesting how often accuracy problems fall back to requiring humans in the loop, and in the case of big consumer systems that means employing people in low wage parts of the world. For playing a match of a video game I don't think there's that much money involved balanced against the amount of playtime to pay for enough monitoring or to ensure a timely response to reports. Gamers always wheel out community run servers and admins because it's pushing the cost onto someone else (I don't think I've ever seen someone volunteer themselves for it), and they'd mostly refuse pay to play if that meant employing a staff that scaled as their online games are popular.
One is the "when everyone is special, no one is special" factor, but I think that's tempered a bit by PCs becoming a status item (alongside the rise of streaming that shows the streamer and their environment) so it's important the PC is conspicuous. Also for those that have invested significant time/money it has become a point of pride for them that they want to display, and get into flamewars on the internet to defend their team. The manufacturers probably don't mind that it lets them display their brand in lights too and not be hidden away as a sticker or PCB marking.
Also that there seems to be space in the market for 'PC as a pretty lightbox', RGB systems are sophisticated now alongside LCD systems getting attached to various components. The PC becomes a decoration as opposed to a tool that fades into the background like a lot of other devices which are pure display or have enthusiasts salivating about thinner bezels. The thing I find curious is that the lightbox is constrained in the form of a PC (even if they sometimes try hard to hide the machinery of it such as wires or putting components on PCBs hidden behind panels), there's not a lot of consumer products where you could assemble elaborate colored lighting displays.
Another variation on this is La Poste in France have a paid service "Watch over my parents" where you can get the postie to do a short regular visit to them (presumably alongside any deliveries) for distant children who can't.
One of the points Linus Torvalds made a few years back was that enthusiasts/PC gamers should be pissed that consumer product availability/support for ECC is spotty because as mentioned up-thread they're the kind of user that will push their system, and if memory is the cause of instability there will be a smoking gun (and they can then set the speed within its stable capacity). Diagnosing bad RAM is a pain in the rear even if you're actively looking for a cause, never mind trying to get a general user to go further than blaming software or gremlins in the system for weirdness on whatever frequency it's occurring at.
Another example is upscaled texture mods, which has been a trend for a long while before 'large language' took off as a trend. Mods to improve textures in a game are definitely not new and that probably means including from other sources, but the ability to automate/industrialize that (and presumably a lot of training material available) meant there was a big wave of that mod category a few years back. My impression is that gamers will overlook a lot so long as it's 'free' or at least are very anti-business (even if the industry they enjoy relies upon it), the moment money is involved they suddenly care a lot about the whole fabric being hand made and need verification that everyone involved was handsomely rewarded.
Language is filled with those types of phrases, the one which bugs me once it was pointed out (even though I use it myself) is "to be honest...", which could carry the implication anything said without that qualifier may be dishonest. What including those phrases seem to come down to is an informal style, a bit more acceptable in a spoken conversation but for written it probably depends on the audience.
Something I'd wonder about is if usage of it has changed based on the medium people use over the years, whether that's in-person, telephone, writing letters, or computer/smartphone writing. Has using computers for short form conversations allowed conversational phrases to bleed into formal writing.
Something I wonder about is whether the next few years will see a (small) fashion trend towards 'dumb PCs' similar to how there's a small group of people that prefer simple/feature/dumb phones. There's a number of factors within the PC space now that could see a PC with limited capabilities or primarily offline find its niche. Along with that, having a distinct form to set it apart from regular computing devices would be interesting, and Apple has a lot of them especially from the G3/G4 era.
I've found internet radio interesting, there's a ton of variety out there that you might not get on a local/national broadcast. Even within a genre, a lot of stations may routinely play the hits but introduce you to different 'sets' of other musicians. More generally on topic, I'd wonder about the approaches different stations and djs use to build their playlists.
The challenge I've found when looking for instructions for flashing one of my old phones is the assumption of knowledge some rom builders have, or perhaps an assumption about their audience. This seems like it has the potential to bit someone in the ass because if they're relying on other sources like the lineageOS wiki or forum posts elsewhere for example there's no guarantee it'll stay available, complete, or relevant to their variant over time. It's an added burden for what is a gracious volunteer role, but it's a handicap if they want more people using the fruits of their labor.
There has been a rumor that some OEMs will releasing gaming oriented laptops with Nvidia N1X Arm CPU + some form of 5070-5080 ballpark GPU, obviously not on x86 windows so it would be pushing the latest compatibility layer.
Alongside the power of a single core, that was alongside adoption of multicore and moving from 32 to 64 bit for the general user, which enabled greater than 4GB memory and lots of processes to co-exist more gracefully.
It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get people to adjust to where transport is less available, and encourage living or working at closer ranges or conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15 minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15 minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints, fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from home.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
There was a similar path with Unreal3. The early games (2006) lighting looks quite harsh by modern standards, one of the highlights of Mirror's Edge (2008) was DICE using third party Illuminate's "beast" lighting, then Epic moved to "lightmass" around 2009 with the public UDK toolset.
I've seen a lot of gamers mention this, but I'd wonder why it hasn't happened yet especially as there's a set of gamers that seem to love centralizing on steam already. One massive downside I can see is that the various public social areas of steam like the game forums are already a cesspool (and have been since they were vBulletin based) and I don't see that improving with more users in near real-time chat.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
One hypothetical I wonder about is what the windows ecosystem would be like if third parties could make distributions of windows, if somehow that could be licensed and enough windows building/packaging was opened up. It'd be interesting to see whether collaborations of projects would form where they pull out MS parts and substitute their own, presumably with the constraint that they maintain compatibility. I imagine it'd take a while for any commercial products thinking of getting involved to figure out sharing, trust, and how to offer it in a way companies or individuals might want to donate/pay for.
Even if we do leave, it's unlikely that we do so for a very long time so taking care of the planet makes sense even if you intend to discard our crib. Similarly in the nearer term if we had a unified goal to colonize a near planet/moon that's still going to take a huge long term effort to do more than the equivalent of putting a tent up on an island off the coast to get that colony established (if it can ever be self-sufficient).
I think PC gaming has some advantage because it casts a huge net over a lot of factors: games big and small, lots of genres, lots of input types, ancient weak hardware to the latest extreme can all be viable, can be tinkered with, developers of all types can produce on it, shared with non-gaming usages. The only way I could see console claiming more of that is if it standardized something similar to a CD/DVD/BD player device, under a consortium and not 'owned' by a single company (or at least easier to license).
I also wonder about M.2 drives, mounted flat to the motherboard with what seems like lip-service to cooling. One of my bug-bears with PC design has been as heat/power demands increase it seems like there's a lack of incentive to do more than the bare minimum on coordination to drastically improve layout, the GPU daughterboard growing into a brick you need to mount and cool is another. I don't entirely blame them when shiny lights keep on selling.
Given the number of computers now it's practically a certainty. One of the big challenges with diagnosing non-ECC RAM is that you can't directly measure it so you're left trying to eliminate issues elsewhere first and measuring symptoms or stress testing to determine if RAM is the most likely failure, meanwhile the system literally can't remember correctly. And that's if you're actively looking to diagnose, as opposed to accepting some gremlin in the machine.
Assuming you can stay out of the way of other satellites I'd guess you think about density in a different way to building on Earth. From a brief look at the ISS thermal system it would seem the biggest challenge would be getting enough coolant and pumping equipment in orbit for a significant wattage of compute.
It's a bit on a tangent because it's about hardware rather than OS choice, but the next few years are going to be a stress test on how much people value PC versus the cash-value of components increases, and what happens to the numbers of people entering the market, staying with older systems or upgrading (or replacing/complimenting with a console). Someone saying they think it's worth a lot is different to opening their wallet.
One aspect I think will be interesting is to compare what happens to attitudes with prices changes in more affluent markets like North America or Western Europe compare to how PC has been approached in other markets like Asia or South America.
The impression I've had for a long while now is that just as the software side is fragmented so is the userbase in what they want, including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away. The trouble I see with catering to all that variation is it's putting an onus for more work on the developer (which needs funding from somewhere, most likely the publisher) and while linux (and GOG) is a niche market in the present and near term it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.
There's definitely a desire for an appliance/console like experience where all the complexity is hidden behind install/play buttons, and steam has got most of the way there. As protondb shows that can't go all the way and tweaking is needed owing to the shifting PC compatibility in general and running software from one OS on a different one, it's the nature of the beast. Personally pushing towards monoculture on an open platform needs to be tempered, and there's a lot of debate previously for other places where that's relevant.
For quite a while I've found that the much easier answer is to have a physical drive per OS and make sure it's the only drive connected during install, or at least one for anything that doesn't play entirely nicely with multi-boot. Obviously there's downsides to that, buying another drive or you might be using something like a laptop which is less friendly to extra drives, dis/reconnecting M.2 drives isn't as trivial as SATA either.
One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.
Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.