By 2008 we were well into the “you should know better than give up personal data” era. That is no excuse. People are just stupid and don’t care.
There were all sorts of publications telling people to protect their personal information, online and in the meat world by 2001, let alone 2008.
I don’t want to victim blame, but going right into this with all the warnings seems pretty stupid to me.
Now what does suck, and horribly so, is that there should be nothing of value gained from that data: there should be laws against nearly everything they could use for corporate advantage, exploitation, identity, etc. With severe consequences.
That is the failure.
Got any stats on the battery thing? Plasma is fairly low resources, my laptop is equal if bit better than gnome in that regard. Certainly better than windows.
I am not using Mint though.
One laptop Arch the other Fedora.