I used to update my laptop in class because my school’s WiFi was so much faster than my home internet.
That’s really strange, the new renderer has been tested pretty thoroughly with modern Nvidia; issues are only expected with older Nvidia cards that require older Nvidia driver versions.
It also has Cosmic. No Gnome session, but Gnome apps.
GTK is now using Vulkan to render things now. What hardware and distro are you running? I would recommend making a report on GTK since your potentially outlier case may affect others.
There’s actually work being done to bring GTK to Android.
Windows assuming it’s the only OS on the machine
That’s not the case. The update was only meant to go out to Windows users. But Microsoft messed up and accidentally released to all users, or at least some who weren’t supposed to receive it. My guess is that Microsoft usually doesn’t update secure boot stuff for dual boot users and instead waits for the distro to push the update.
Do keep in mind that Ventoy works differently from flashing tools like BalenaEtcher. Those differences may break certain ISOs, though in my experience that’s rare.