If one is going through the hassle of joining a video call on a different device to then scan it with their smartphone, all to just connect with another person, you could reasonably assume that they're friends.
Maybe if there's a "celebrity" that displays it on a live stream, that's a bigger issue, but there could be other mechanisms to dissuade this behaviour. Perhaps you could only add one friend with one QR code.
As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch.
Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.
As a long term linux user, I agree with the comments that essentially say: "you found a hobby and not an OS".
While I see that recommending a different distro seems like more change and more fiddling about, Bazzite is something to try out for sure. As long as you don't have a very complicated usecase, it really does get out of your way and remove a lot of the foot-guns you find on linux.
I really think it's ideal for a gamer usecase, and it's also great for a parent/casual user who does most of their work inside a browser anyway.
As a programmer with a big distro-hopping past, I've switched to Bluefin/Bazzite on all my personal computers and things work well. I'm glad to have something that works well out of the box and glad to not think about the OS.
Private space is identical to work profile. In the past, private space didn't exist and people used work profile instead as a workaround, but now that's not needed.
Private Space has a superior approach to isolation and encryption matching user profiles. Work profiles have some compromises for historical reasons. Private Space should be preferred over a work profile and the only reason to use a work profile for your own local usage is to use both a work profile and Private Space at the same time. Once GrapheneOS has support for multiple Private Spaces within a user, the use case for work profiles will be limited to the intended Bring Your Own Device enterprise deployment purpose. The intended purpose of work profiles is companies not having to give their employees work phones but rather owning/controlling a specific profile on their device with some influence over the overall device via rules for lock method, etc.
Not OP, but I feel like moving from Google to Zoho is just kicking the can down the road. You don't know how these big corporations will change their product or (more importantly for cash strapped organisations like Universities) their pricing structure.
It seems like a much safer to bet to move to an open source project instead. The costs of hosting it would be well known and predictable.
Blocking the advertising itself only shields you from the advertising, it still lets these services set up the underlying surveillance/advertising system that harms society (and you) in the long run.
Of course it's not always possible, but it would be ideal to use services that don't have advertisements for anybody.
If you're interested in self-hosting your orchestration server, you can look into Netbird. It's a very similar tool, but has the server open sourced as well. So you have a self-hosted control server with a nice GUI and all the features the paid version does.
Compared to Headscale, Netbird has so many moving pieces! It looks robust, and powerful, and featureful... yet, self-hosting Headscale is super simple, and less demanding.
I've been slowly moving everything over from Tailscale to Netbird and aside from some shenanigans with Tailscale taking over the entire CGNAT route, it works wonderfully!
Tailscale is still running for now, but I'm getting closer and closer to decommissioning it and switching entirely to Netbird.
Maybe if there's a "celebrity" that displays it on a live stream, that's a bigger issue, but there could be other mechanisms to dissuade this behaviour. Perhaps you could only add one friend with one QR code.