Why can’t humanity seem to learn that storing all of our knowledge and cultural artifacts in just one place with no backup is a BAD IDEA? Don’t let the library of Alexandria burn again!

At least you actually got Xbox Accessories to recognize your controller. I can’t even get it to show up even though it’s clearly connected and recognized as an xbox controller in device manager. Granted, passing the usb port through to a windows vm in order to do this probably isn’t ideal, but I can’t install it on my work computer and I’d really rather not have spyware os installed bare metal on any of my personal machines that I actually daily drive. Even when I decided fuck it I’ll throw it on an old thinkpad, it just refuses to boot the win10/11 installer.

When troubleshooting, it’s nice to be able to ask copilot about the issue in human language and have it actually understand my question (unlike a search engine) and pull from and reference relevant documentation in its answers. Going back and forth with it has saved me several hours of searching for something that I had never even heard of a couple of times.

It’s also great for rewriting things in a specific tone. I can give it a bland/terse/matter-of-fact paragraph and get back a more fun or professional or friendly version that would feel ridiculously cringe if I attempted to write it myself, but the AI makes it work somehow.

At what point when accumulating grains of sand do they become a heap?

There is no rule. It just is whatever it is.

policy control

It’s not exactly the same, but you could use puppet to enforce configuration

Software Center with software allow lists

You can setup a custom repository with only approved software and then set that as the only one that the system is configured to retrieve packages from. This can also be controlled via puppet.

controlled OS updates

Same as the previous point. Upgrades are installed from the repos.

zscaler

I don’t know what that is/does, and their website isn’t helping.

software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present

I’m pretty sure carbon black app control has a linux version.

antivirus

There are a number of different antivirus solutions for linux. A quick search will give you a bunch of lists. I’m not personally familiar with any of the options, but I don’t imagine it will be difficult to find one that will work for your use case.

I’d rather they not give a damn what browser you use as long as it complies with current web standards. That’s kinda the whole point of there being open standards.