That is fair. I was more trying to make the point that what each streaming service charges now isn’t unreasonable, it is the fact that you need to pay for all of them which can easily be 80-100 a month. 35 for no drm, no bs streaming would be high, but still better than it is now.
There is nothing inerrantly wrong with streaming, it is the fact that all the streaming services suck. The experience to watch a show through streaming is:
Look up what streaming service its on.
Realize you don’t have it, pay $25 a month for a subscription.
Watch the show in 480p even though you paid for 4k.
Realize you are using the “wrong” browser & try chromium
Realize chromium doesn’t work either and install their proprietary app.
In the time that you were getting their app working, they lost the rights to the show. Restart on new streaming service.
If it were instead:
go to any streaming service of your choice
Pay $35 a month
Watch on Firefox on Linux in 4k, a lot fewer people would pirate.
I used to like Debian based (and still do; I use it on my server with no intention of switching) but Opensuse is great on the desktop and supports 32 bit. Even tumbleweed is rock solid.
Idk for the how but airvpn does for comparable prices. This coming from a fellow multi-tb Linux iso torrenter. Also I assume you mean VPN unless mullvad does VPS stuff I don’t know of.
My advice for finding torrents, so long as they are not insanely obscure, is using qbittorrent with tons of search plugins. It may be hard to find av1 but if you have a new GPU you can transcode quickly, or if you don’t you can always use software encoding.
I accidentally clicked on one of the similar IPs links without realizing and someone with that ip happened to have gotten some of the same stuff I did. I was briefly quite worried.
Going straight to Debian isn’t hard. LMDE might have newer packages, IDK. I used Debian 12 for a bit and still use it on my server. Mint offers a great stock experience but Debian has a hard to explain vanilla coolness if you will. I would also recommend considering OpenSUSE if you haven’t looked at it.