They actually did a study on it after rolling back to Windows, and it turned out to not have failed due to technical difficulties at all.
If I recall correctly they stated that something like 80-90% of all issues reported during the period were due to badly designed processes - processes which were the same as in Windows, and the number of technical issues actually dropped.

Certainly, the fact that Microsoft promised to build a fancy new HQ in the city if they switched back to Windows can't have had anything to do with the choice to roll back...

There are actually a few projects doing exactly that, at least for the early entries;

• FreeSO - Open-source version of The Sims: Online but with a bunch of modern improvements, main server shut down at the end of last year
• Simitone - Single-player interface for FreeSO
• FreeSims - Open-source engine for The Sims
• OpenTS2 - Open-source implementation of The Sims 2 engine in Unity

Development pace for them is somewhat slow due apparent lack of interest - and a healthy dose of fear of EA interference - though.

Well, Flatpak installs aliases, so as long as your distribution - or yourself - add the <installation>/exports/bin path to $PATH, then you'll be able to use the application IDs to launch them.

And if you want to have the Flatpak available under a different name than its ID, you can always symlink the exported bin to whatever name you'd personally prefer.
I've got Blender set up that way myself, with the org.blender.Blender bin symlinked to /usr/local/bin/blender, so that some older applications that expect to be able to simply interop with it are able to.

One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.

I think the only project I've seen so far where I've felt that a blockchain has actually been the correct choice is Alfis, which is a decentralized DNS that uses the blockchain as the public append-only ledger that it is, and it uses proof-of-work to add arbitrary costs to updates - to make spamming or namesquatting expensive.

Has anything actually happened in ownClouds development?

The last I saw of them was FOSDEM a few years back, where NextCloud were handing out whitepapers and showing off their new Hub, chat, VoIP stack, group sharing system, and more. And ownCloud were sat somewhat opposite with two people and a screen showing a screenshot of a default ownCloud install, along with a big sign hanging from the ceiling saying "Join the winning team."

Great, now I can finally play MY LITTLE PONY: A Maretime Bay Adventure without having to worry what my friends will think of me. A++ feature.

Took this a few days ago. I'd been reading, and put my pad down to go grab a cup of tea, returned to this.
The image is downscaled quite a bit, was originally posted elsewhere and had to fit in the size limit.

It makes sense to use the words that people are most used to, and bluescreen/BSOD has been the go-to lingua for describing a crash/error screen - even if not blue - since a while now.

If they actually put trackpads on them then Windows wouldn't be as much of an idiotic decision.
Windows with only sticks is absolutely insane, Windows with trackpads is just less smart.

To me it sounds a lot like "We don't really want to answer that question, so here's a bit of technobabble to ease your mind."

I mean, writing your own linked list in C and then summing its values could be considered as having "a proprietary data model that calculates", but it has basically nothing to do with the question on how they track such things, just hints that they're not using an existing - and proven - tracking method.

To clarify; they took the question "How are you tracking installs" to mean "With your tracking data, how are you counting installs", and then basically answered "We add the numbers together"
This is a complete non-answer, and it seems to suggest that their actual tracking method is likely unreliable.

This is basically the reason for one of the main characters being there in Stargate Universe.