I’ve got duo; we had to have it at my uni for 2FA for our school emails. As far as I can tell it really isn’t very invasive. That said, I do think it tracks general location but I don’t believe it goes further than that.

My uni used Ubuntu in the CompE computer labs; unfortunately all other labs were windows. But the introduction to Linux was certainly nice!

Oh, of course. There are negatives to everything for sure. But I think as a whole it’s made life better in a lot of different ways.

Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket

As someone that works at a storage devices company - we do still manufacture 10K HDDs. They are faster than the 7200s of the same spec, by nature. All 2.5” drives for enterprise systems. And will actually continue selling them until ~2030. That said, they’re all but obsolete at this point, and aren’t really being developed on any more.