Yeah. Spotify really got to me. It’s so convenient to have everything available. At least it used to be that way except for the one-off obscure album or a few artists who still own their copyrights and can decide to not participate. But lately a few of the songs have become greyed out and unavailable. And the unavoidable enshittification has begun.
I still remember the times when I bought CDs and owned stuff. And the time when lots of series were available on Netflix and it was worth it’s (lower) monthly price. But as of now half the movies and series I like aren’t available. Like Star Trek, all the Disney movies…
And concerning Spotify: I read they pay an artist at most a third of a cent per streamed song. That is ripping off the artists anyways. I think I could just cancel my subscription, rip off the artists myself and cut out the middle man.
Hehe. I think the majority of people (who haven’t stumbled here by accident) don’t really need that reminder.
I’m a bit unsure. I don’t really mind stealing from big companies. Even more so if they make all those stupid business decisions and start to become more and more greedy. I personally think it’s a bit unethical to pay for stolen goods. That is fencing. But I think everyone should decide for themselves how they’d like to handle this.
If Nextflix only licenses a show for temporary use by me, it’s more a license violation than a proper analogy to stealing that would apply. But maybe I shoud read a book and not watch that much TV anyways.
Is Usenet always that expensive? Their recommended plan is $30 per month with a discount for the first three months. And the cheapest one is $10/month but that only gets you 20GB…
I’m not really a pirate so I don’t know much about paid pirating services. But I’m pretty sure I could get Netflix and Disney+ for that kind of money. Is Usenet access really worth that much?
Thanks for clarifying. Yeah I implied that but didn’t explain all the nuances. I’ve been scolded before for advertising the use of Debian testing. I’m quite happy with it. But since I’m not running any cutting edge things on my server and Docker etc have become quite stable… I don’t see any need to put testing on the server. I also use stable there and embrace the security fixes and stability / low maintenance. I however run testing/unstable on my laptop.
It’s relatively alright for something that’s called unstable. There is also testing which is tested for at least 10 days. And you can mix and match, but that’s not recommended either.
I wouldn’t put it on my server. And I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who isn’t okay with fixing the occasional hiccup. But I’ve been using it for years and I like it.
However, mind that it’s not supported and they do not pay attention to security fixes.
Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it’s enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I’d prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.
If you’d like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.
Yeah, paying with credit card also works for me. And I use the browser a lot for stuff like that. Just the added layers in the apps sometimes don’t work. Like when I tried riding one of those electric scooters. I was able to put in my credit card details and they got accepted, and I know my phone is capable of doing NFC, but somehow there is something else in that app that prevents me from doing the actual transaction and rent the scooter. Online-shopping and things like that work fine. I don’t need an App to use Amazon or PayPal… So I wouldn’t know either.
Thx. I’m going to look up the de-googled phones you mentioned. I think I will try to use my Pixel as long as it works, but in theory it isn’t supported anymore and I’m supposed to buy a new one now. At least that’s what Google and GrapheneOS tell me.
Thank you. I completely agree. We can’t do stuff ourselves, my Pixel 4a is End of Life now and all the proprietary parts of the system won’t be updated anymore, which is a shame because the hardware is still perfectly fine.
And I hate the business decisions Google makes. Android is built upon Linux and the core is supposed to be free software. But then they move more and more stuff into their proprietary Google services packages. Like the proper keyboard with swipe typing, the better calendar app, text to speech, push notifications and all of the payment stuff. I personally replaced everything on the phone with a custom ROM, and did not install the google services. But I had to find alternatives to all of that and some things really don’t work as well. It’s a hassle and some things just don’t work at all. Like some stuff that requires in-app payment. I don’t care too much, because I get most of my Apps from F-Droid anyways and they’re open-source. But I can’t pay with my phone in the supermarket, can’t rent those silly electric scooters and a few other things.
Yeah, I think so, too. It doesn’t have to be this way. I mean this is mainly due to the way ARM hardware works, lack of good drivers, maintenance and dedication by the manufacturers of that hardware. And everything is quite fragmented. In theory we could have a hardware platform that has good open-source drivers and is well-supported. The Pinephone was an attempt to establish one platform that people could focus on. But it has quite some limitations and also hardware/design issues.
And Linux isn’t quite there yet. I mean I love Linux and it can run on embedded devices very well. But things like connected standby (for example receiving chat messages while the hardware sleeps and saves power) just isn’t implemented in a desktop environment that was made for computers. And also not in a chat application that was made for computers. So, set aside the hardware and driver issues, we have another issue with Linux software that wasn’t made to run on smartphones.
There is a way around that and that is to add those capabilities to the Linux kernel. And also give applications means to stay connected in the background, adapt to different screen sizes, rotate the screen and evict themselves from RAM. It’s kind of what Android is. It builds upon the Linux kernel and adds lots of stuff that is specifically useful on smartphones.
I hope someday some of those techniques get adopted into the mainline Linux kernel and also the frameworks the desktop software uses.
Forget the pinephone as a daily driver. It is nice to play around with and having linux on your phone is awesome. But you can’t really use it as a daily driver. You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects. Trust me, I own a pinephone and I know other people who do.
There’s nothing wrong with it. Just like 50 mild annoyances with anything you’re trying to do with it and on top it’s super slow, compared to any other smartphone.
As I read, the phone by Purism isn’t much better and it’s really expensive.
Try it with a Live USB stick. And maybe don’t listen to the people recommending Ubuntu. It’s somewhat okay, but they regularly do annoying business decisions that affect their users. I’d rather start with Mint or something.
There are many other websites dedicated to this question:
If you use one of the standard graphical desktops (Gnome, KDE, …) you don’t need to explore all of the config files. The most important settings should be in a settings program.
And programs should (mostly) come with sane default settings anyways. Debian adds a few. So the usual way (for beginners) is to start with the defaults and change around stuff once you want to customize something, and starting with the software you use the most (like an text editor, …). The standard GUI software (like your browser, LibreOffice) has GUI settings dialogues anyways.
Well, Codeberg is a non-profit. I would say if it’s just a few kilobytes/megabytes of code, upload it and donate $10. That should be enough to store that for decades.
I sometimes look for small stuff. Boilerplate code, how other people configure stuff that isn’t well documented, niche interest stuff even if it’s not finished. Sometimes stuff like that is useful.
I’d say so, too. I’ve seen at least 3 tech illiterate people (who gave it a chance) be really happy with Linux. You will probably face some annoyance at some point, as it is with everything. But I think Linux is a good choice. Get help installing it if you know someone who can. It’s not that difficult but that would speed up the process. The most important thing is to save your data so you don’t accidentally overwrite it.
Heavily depends on the community. I see lots of communities with few down-votes happening. But it’s definitely a thing in -for example- the political/news ones.