But GCC did not improve their error messages (much) prior to Rust, despite Clang’s error messages comparing favorably to GCC even before Rust 1.0 was released, as for example discussed in

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ClangDiagnosticsComparison?action=recall&rev=1

Rust itself is 14 years old, slightly older than above wiki page, and even back then it had great error messages, though they’ve also improved since. Here’s a fun site where you can see how error messages have evolved through Rust’s life:

https://kobzol.github.io/rust/rustc/2025/05/16/evolution-of-rustc-errors.html

It’s only very recently that GCC has started to catch up, for example with some nice improvements in GCC 15:

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/04/10/6-usability-improvements-gcc-15

Do yourself a favor and get a USB stick with Linux on it, regardless of whether or not you are going to use it to install Linux.

When stuff breaks, you’ll regret not having a bootable media like that. Also, if you are using windows and Bitlocker (the default these days), then be sure to store your encryption keys somewhere, where you can easily access them. Otherwise you won’t be able to access your Windows drives

“Free” and “libre”. But this has only ever referred to the software itself, not to the hardware needed to use it.

That should be obvious, since otherwise almost no OSS would be FLOSS. After all, you have to buy a PC or another device to run it