The last time I tried that getting google play services working was a long, annoying process and did not work. I don't expect google to make any of that easy for us.
I'd stick with Windows in your case. No shame in using what works. I had a laptop with hybrid Nvidia graphics and never could get it working satisfactorily with Linux.
I honestly don't get the outage over that. I feel like I'm in the minority on that, though. I don't care if linguistic statics are gathered from my public comments. Knock yourself out.
This story is about "private" messages on a free hosted service, and I think their users are just being naive if they think this is beyond the pale. But I get the feeling of violation at least a little.
I think you're right, since a website like SteamHistory is definitely not going to bother establishing a representative in an EU state the only recourse would be to try to go through the US legal system and it's far from clear to me how that would go. GDPR seems like it was written with actual businesses in mind, but SteamHistory isn't exactly that. I think a business would want to comply or lose access to a valuable market, but there's less leverage on a (seemingly) privately run web site.
Most work laptops I've seen use smart cards for this. The computer is locked unless your card is inserted and a PIN is entered, and removing the card locks the computer.
I remember him being pro-union, but that's about it.