Have been running Tumbleweed on an old laptop for a couple of years that I update now and then, only time something broke was when plasma 6 was released and that was because of third party themes, reset to standard themes and everything worked again. Also have a gaming computer running Tumbleweed since October that i update almost daily, no issues yet on that one.

Active ear protection become passive when the batteries fail. The active part is that they have microphones on the outside so that you can hear normally with them on. I do agree though that noice cancelling headphones should not be used as hearing protection.

There is Windows Subsystem for Linux.