Married at 23 (wife just turned 21) straight out of college. We were both very immature, and we divorced two years later after she fooled around with her 55 year old boss. Left me devastated at 25 going on 26 thinking I was used goods. After a lot of maturing, a few more relationships, I remarried at 33.
It takes a lot of self reflection - because even though I could chalk up the previous marriage to “lol she a hoe” - I had piss poor financial skills, was very immature and lacked a lot of self confidence which manifested itself in toxic behavior all around. There are times I just cringe at who I was at that age. Not that I’m a perfect person now, I’m just more aware of what I needed to improve in myself to be a decent person and partner.
Part of it is the age old wisdom of learning to love yourself and figuring out what you like, versus just trying to mold yourself into the person you think your partner wants. And not to say that “oh I’m an asshole, They have to deal with it” but truly understanding what makes you tick and finding someone who loves and accepts that part of you.
I’ve been slowly whittling down my subscriptions over time. At one point I think I had like 12-14 subs to various services, be it streaming, games, etc. But I was also up to my eyeballs in credit card debt and I had extremely poor personal finance skills and practices. When I met my wife, who was the exact opposite of me (extremely responsible with her finances, knew where every single one of her dollars was going), I knew I had to cut back significantly.
Right now I have the following 5 subs per month;
Apple 50gb data (1/month) YouTube Premium Family (22/month) Crunchyroll (8/month) Prime (15/month) ChatGPT (20/month)
Basically 66/month in hard earned dollars.
Prior to this I had the equivalent of an overblown cable package with all the bells and whistles, spending easily 350+ per month.
I don’t judge anyone who decides to save their money, because we’re getting nickel and dimed to death. And by decentralizing the cost of subs to the point where it makes an Applebees menu look small, it makes it incredibly hard to figure out where your dollars are going, and hard to cancel as you need to contact a laundry list of independent service providers.
My wife and I use YouTube and Crunchyroll as our primary entertainment sources, so we can justify those expenses. But all other sources (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, Hulu, etc) are so infrequent that we only sub for a single month if there is something we absolutely want to watch, and even then, we wait until the season is wrapping up so we can binge it in a week and then cancel the sub immediately.
Just my perspective on it, and if we didn’t watch YouTube almost every night, we’d probably just figure out a way to hack the AppleTV to circumvent ads.
It’s like predicting a stock market crash. If you predict it every year for the rest of your life, you’ll probably be right at some point. Keyword: “probably”
This is interesting to me for my use case scenario, specifically SteamOS.
What I’m trying to do is run an emulated Everquest server (lookup EQEmu). The community there has several methods of installation of the server, Windows, Linux, and Docker. The hurdle to overcome is the immutable file system, specifically when it comes to the database (MariaDB). I think I may have found a work around via Linux brew and installing MariaDB through that (which I’ve done, I just have to make the final connection). However the Docker setup, when running it on a separate distro is stupid easy. If they make this a Flatpak, it can potentially be the solution I’m looking for.
Really the end goal is creating a Single player Everquest. I have a dual boot with it operating via Windows, but would much prefer to have it on the SteamOS side of the house.
Edit: My bad. I did the thing where I read like the first two sentences and didn’t read the rest. Reading the rest of the reply basically acknowledged my refute.
The majority of this waste is coming from businesses that now need to upgrade. That’s why there are IT departments to figure it out for the tech illiterate. As long as they can open their email client, a text editor and excel, you’ve overcome 90% of what a business needs for their computers.
You are right, Grandma Jones with her 800x600 resolution screen, 10 downloaded tool bars and Microsoft Edge ain’t going to get it, but Grandma Jones is still using XP, a CRT and a Gateway Computer she bought back in 2006
Although I’m not surprised, it is interesting that the same big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft taking stances on being “environmentally conscious” while also ignoring forced obsoletion of old hardware. Your average office environment just needs basic email, document/excel editing software and a browser. Now to continue to do these base functions, they have to buy new PCs to do the same exact thing. And it’s not even faster anymore due to the bloat.
If tech wants to preach about the environment, they best start figuring out ways to keep computers out of the landfills.
It’s pretty easy honestly. The community devs do a good job of making it fairly straightforward. You can slap it on windows, Linux, or docker, and as long as you aren’t facing an immutable file system OS, it’s really easy. Ubuntu/Debian work best with the Linux install.
Another user commented that gnome boxes is setup in a way that isn’t conducive to what I want, setup as a qemu user bridge mode.
My knowledge of docker is novice at best, I’m only familiar with a handful of commands based on some hand hold levels of tutorials. Thank you for the resource, I’ll research it more to see if I can get a better handle on it.
I’ve seen virt-manager recommended in similar situations like mine. I’ll explore it - at first my thought was it may not be ideal as I’ll most likely need to overcome the immutable file system that comes with SteamOS. You can bypass it, but it isn’t ideal as anything written into the innate read only section of the OS is wiped on update. But thinking about it more, I may be able to use distrobox as a way to bypass it. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll report back with my findings. I also appreciate you mentioning the qemu user mode networking with gnome boxes, that makes sense.