We must have the same inlaws haha. Similar situation with my wife's parents and one sibling. They've never met our kid and still put all their right wing Facebook conspiracies ahead of meeting him. No loss to us - we'd rather spend time with sane people anyway.
ThePrivacyPolicy
Switched to mint on my laptop a couple months ago and love it, using it full time on that system. Still need to run windows on my desktop for some audio production and VR gaming, but honestly that system is going to Mint next for the other 90% of the usage. Couldn't believe how refined the Linux desktop experience has gotten, but then again last time I gave it a try was probably well over a decade ago :)
If this takes off I figure it's only a matter of time until services start blocking them. What's changed between the old days of Trillian and now is that capitalism has advanced much further along and these companies have too much to lose by not being able to data harvest right in their own apps now 😉
Sadly, some of the chaos is already spilling over. The guy slated to probably be our next PM is basically Trump Jr. and has done all he can to appeal to the far right here, who have gotten exponentially more vocal and empowered in recent years. My province is also working slowly toward privitized healthcare too. Canada is more and more just America Jr. these days.
The one near me (in Canada), just can't seem to figure out what it wants to be and reinvents itself, and fails further, about every five years or so. They went through a phase with a massive music section, probably 25% or more of the store and tried to take on music store chains - that was always dead empty. Then that section went away for a while, and then they fully closed for a huge overhaul and re-opened with about 75% of the store now just an appliance store. The whole place is a ghost town and used to be quite busy when it was an electronics store like we normally associate them to be. I don't even shop online anymore because they've expanded into the whole "marketplace" concept and are just another amazon where you need to closely check where you're even buying from. I bet there'd be more success in doing what they're good at instead of having to try and be like everyone else.
I'll back you up with a source since I just went down this rabbit hole on another comment https://www.dal.ca/news/2021/11/29/milk-jugs--cartons-or-plastic-bags---which-one-is-best-for-the-e.html
I did it when I was travelling to the US a few years back and the store clerk looked at me like I had two heads. It's so normal in Canada I never thought much of it, and here I was a celebrity in this store and everyone was just wow'd at the magic I'd done.