I stopped reading after the third book too, and that’s exactly the sense I got.

There’s no conclusions, just character deaths. It’s just an unraveling web that becomes less and less coherent the further it goes.

Caffeine is pretty well studied and it’s known that the long term health effects are nothing close to cocaine. I doubt if there was any good science back then on the long term effects of cocaine, let alone enough education for the populace to know and understand it.

However social perceptions may change anyway. What we consider as not serious may be considered much more serious in the future. For example many people get headaches or even migraines as a withdrawal symptom of caffeine, and we don’t consider a headache to be serious.

But I saw a Star Trek episode once where Picard gets a headache and it was a big deal because those had been solved for hundreds of years by that time! Turns out the ferengi were controlling his mind or something. So caffeine may be considered a serious drug in the future if it interferes with the detection of alien mind control devices.

Trans trees are trees.

I honestly feel like people who say this stuff either haven’t tried Linux since 2008 or went straight to Arch.

I use Manjaro as my daily driver and I never need to fix the system. It really does just work, and these a bunch of disyros out there that do.

The only thing you might find terrible is trying to run windows programs on Linux, to which I say: dual boot! Even with all the progress Proton, Lutris etc. have made, it’s still way easier to just boot into windows on the occasion you want to play games or whatever.