Uranium_Green

A literal caltrop

Tbh the advice provided is already pretty accurate, as to how; there's a non zero chance that a friend may have sent you a RAT (remote admin tool/remote access Trojan), these are basically the best back door to someone's computer you can have, normally you want to have physical access to someone's computer to install them or have a user run it with elevated privileges, (there are other ways as well, such as spoofing a jpg, other methods of remote code execution). These tools will allow you to access there computer, files, keylog, steal passwords, send popups, open and close the disk tray plus basically anything else you could do with access to the computer.

Basically follow other people's advice in regards to undoing this.

Or using any legacy hardware such as the playstation eyetoy camera, a usb keyboard with a built in piano keyboard, some old random TV tuner card

Then there's the hardware which windows only ever had 32bit drivers for, meaning even if you find the drivers on some obscure dodgy site they'll never work.

Then there's the whole bs of windows not allowing unsigned drivers.

None of these issues on Linux

Pro tip, if the joints on them are starting to not hold together of their own accord and you don't want them to fall apart: use zip ties on the edges/corners to reinforce them.