There will always be someone who is beating you in a metric (buying houses, having kids, promotions, pay, relationships, etc…) fixating on it will drive you mad.

Instead you should compare your current status against where you were and appreciate how you are moving forward

As for age

During university my best mate was 27 who dropped out of his final year, grabbed a random job, then went to college to get a BTEC so they could start the degree.

It was similar in my graduate intake, we had a 26 year old who had been a brickie for 5 years before getting a comp sci degree.

The first person I line managed was a junior 15 years older than me, who had a completely different career stream. They had the house, kids, had managed big teams, etc… honestly I learnt tons from them.

Can you elaborate…

I have looked after a few instances of Active Directory and basic user management involved multiple steps through GUI’s clearly written at different times (you would go from a Windows 8 to Windows 95 to Windows XP styled windows, etc…)

I much prefer FreeIPA, if I wanted to modify a user account it was two button clicks. Adding a group and bulk applying was the work of moments. You can setup replicas and for a couple hundred users it uses no resources.

The only advantage I could see related to Exchange Integration as it makes it really easy to setup Sharepoint, Skype & Email.

Sharepoint never gets setup properly and you find people switching to alternatives like Confluence, Github/Gitlab Pages or Media Wiki. So that isn’t an advantage.

Everybody loathes Skype and your asked to setup an alternative (Mattermost, Slack, Zoom, etc…). I am not sure how integrated Teams is.

Which really only leaves Email and I just can see the one off pain of setting up Dovecot as worth the ongoing usability pain of AD’s user control.

You realise Debian is the base distribution?

Ubuntu takes 6 monthly cuts from Debian Testing, adds some in house stuff puts them through QA and performs a release.

Linux Mint is produced by Cinnamon devs, similar to KDE Neon. They take the last Ubuntu LTS, remove many of the in house additions, add the latest Cinnamon desktop and release.

Cinnamon got upstreamed into Debian to make the process easier.

The person is correct in this isn’t a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.

Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.

Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.

You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn

Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is

sudo usermod -aG docker $user

To ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.