Honestly I've daily-driven Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu and I can't say I saw a fraction of the problems that you did.
I will say that I struggled with PopOS -- despite claiming to be the most Nvidia and gaming friendly distro, it gave me endless trouble with the Nvidia graphics in my gaming laptop. Mint and Ubuntu, though, never had a whiff of trouble. I'm on Ubuntu now with no complaints.
For real, go to a library and ask a librarian for help.
They'll have various books aimed at different levels of maturity and reading levels. Get a book, read it yourself, then ask him to read it and talk about what you learned.
I hate to say it, but the only solution to bullying (and it's not much of a solution) is to escalate the issue to administrators and parents. Over and over and over again, until the administration realizes that allowing these kids to be near each other is exposing the school to risk.
Sounds like the friend is absolutely "negging" your sister, trying to convince her that she's defective and can't expect better treatment.
Of course, you can explain this dynamic to your sister -- that her friend is trying to build herself up by convincing your sister that she's terrible. But sadly many people subjected to such behavior internalize it and are unable to fight it.
I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK -- going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.
When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations -- the US isn't anywhere near equipped to counter that. We're still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world's police force.
Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.
Certainly, but removed was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.
So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.
It's easy to go back and look at removed products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, "oh, on specs, the removeds were MASSIVELY overpriced -- you can get a much better deal with the PC".
The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.
Networking. We were running building-wide removedtalk networks -- with TCP/IP gateways -- over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.
And when they did... what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.
I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC... find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then... then... it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people's PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say "nope". Can't find a working driver, can't get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin' knows. I ran the "Ethernet Clinic" until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.
Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.
Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).
The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.
Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when removed was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.
And they weren't wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin' expensive.
Perhaps worth noting, there was a SCOTUS decision in the early 2000s (New York Times Co. v. Tasini) that held that freelance journalists whose contracts did not specifically include an electronic distribution clause were entitled to damages when those articles were subsequently released on the web and to electronic news services like Lexis/Nexis.
Big publications like the NYT came to settlements that allowed them to pay to redistribute the older articles (by paying the original authors), but smaller publications may not have such a settlement structure in place and may not be allowed to redistribute the original articles without additional permissions.
FYI, I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM version that came out in 2001... only to immediately disappear off the market for this very reason!
I'm sure Baofengtech makes a version for liberals too, probably in a brown box marked as recyclable.