Wooooosh

What relevance does Linux have in this specific context? Does Linux have a marketing team? Does Linux compete on a hardware level with Apple? Is there a Linux corp we haven't heard about that's working with some chip manufacturer we also haven't heard about in order to create ARM processors that can compete with Apple silicon? No? Maybe don't shoehorn Linux into everything regardless of relevance, especially not in such a lane way.

Speaking as someone who's still transitioning from windows to Linux on his machines...

1. My main concern is that the software I use should feel like it's there for ME, not for the company it's from. Windows does not feel like it's putting me first. Many have covered all the reasons in detail, but I don't like having to fight my OS to get things the way I want them.... Which is funny because

2. Yeah, its fun to tinker with Linux, but there is some fighting to get it to do what you want, especially when you're new to it. For instance, I'm on KDE, I set up a very aesthetic top bar with a calendar & time widget in the middle. It took me MONTHS and countless small sessions of reading to get my email's events and special dates to show up on the calendar. I was missing KOrganizer, as well as some extra settings that only show up on the calendar widget if you have KOrganizer installed. I've yet to figure out how to refresh the data to get up to date info, because so far it seems like the data just stays stale. I'll eventually get to it.

I also randomly corrupted my partition during an update and spent a good 5 hours getting it back. I'm experienced enough that I wasn't worried at all, and I was even enjoying the process at the beginning....but by the end of it, I was just annoyed. The solution? Yeah my distro's documentation mentions a specific command, "rebuild-kernels" which instantly fixed my partition. It was like the second sentence in an article about my bootloader. I felt stupid for how simple that was, compared to how much I was doing with other suggestions I found online....

So yeah, point is, it's tough, and I personally am not fond of it, since I just want my PC to let me do my thing while I let it do its thing. Even then, I would still rather deal with that kind of thing than deal with Microsoft's or Apple's shenanigans (also, kinda hoping that immutable distro's aren't as tedious, even though I know they will be, cause I think that would be an even more ideal system, one that's very tough to corrupt).

3. I totally get the sentiment on overpowered hardware. The nice thing about this era of Computing is that you can do a lot of things that you currently pay for as a service online. You just need some of that overpowered hardware you might already have lying around. Want to stop paying for a cloud photo backup? You can spin up an immich server. Too many streaming services with too little content? Fuck em, spin up a Jellyfin or Plex instance, automate content downloads with Arr services, hell, create your own subtitles with a speech to text language model running on your own equipment. Philips suddenly wants you to have an account to turn on your lightbulbs? Throw in home assistant to the stage, tell your lightbulbs to know their place. LastPass leaked your passwords? Throw them into Vaultwarden, throw your second factor in there as well (or don't, convenience vs security, and I'm too fucking lazy to care).

The amount of stuff that can be self hosted is insane, and it can absolutely replace a lot of the things you're currently using, and it can all happen in a specialized Linux-based OS for running a bunch of services, such as Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, unRAID, etc.

In the end, though, there's a lot of "having to learn new things" and "loving to tinker" needed for a lot of it. It's fine that your average user isn't interested. It's sad for those of us who care, who truly believe we need to regain most of our freedom from this tech, but it's totally not the end of the world either. Maybe there's no appeal to the average user....yet.

My advice would always be to try, say, Linux mint on a spare laptop, and force yourself to use it for casual stuff. Give it a try, and if it geeks out on you too much for your liking, you go back to your platform of choice. No biggie, it just doesn't hurt to see what's on the other side. Who knows, maybe you don't mind the casual tinkering that you may encounter, maybe you don't even feel a difference in day to day use compared to your platform of choice, or hopefully you like it even more because it might do things in an easier manner than you're used to. If that's the case, then think about whether you're ok with Apple's walled garden, or Microsoft's occasional antitrust infringements, or if you might simply want something to work your way and not the creating company's way.

I see where you're coming from, because I kinda also hate the genres you mentioned in specific, but man, it's not ALL bad. You put on some Juan Luis Guerra and he makes better bachata than anyone else you can think of. It's actually fucking enjoyable. It took me decades to even begin to appreciate some of the more pop music (or even tolerate it, cause fuck regueton....but everyone listens to it where I live), and he definitely stands out.

That's it, I just wanted to mention the 440.

He says it's ok to torture Muslims because other Muslims also torture Muslims and are OK with it or don't care, so we should all be OK with it as well, or at the very least not care about them. Perfectly sound logic, you see.

I had pretty much the same experience you did. I did randomly find a reddit post with a ublock custom filter to avoid the whole "page not loading at all" thing. Ever since, I've had only one ubo failure that I fixed with the routine filters refresh, and dare I say youtube's actually been getting faster for me lately? I did have that slowdown, due to their thing that prevented the page from loading, but now it's almost like they've ramped down on their efforts.

Edit: I'm here to stand corrected. Fuckers are messing with any browser that's not theirs. Add the following filter to ublock if your video pages take 5 seconds to load: www.youtube.com###+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.01)

Hear me out. Christmas rice with raisins. They absorb moisture from the dish and become these sweet little treats in the midst of a very buttery and savory rice. I hate raisins but I fucking love that rice.

Are you for real here? Reducing the dependability on user interactions also reduces the chance for user error, and helps keep people alive in some cases. Even if that weren't the case, it's not your place to call out someone's medical treatments and compare them to your (at best) anecdotal experiences. It's not outrageous to want a CGM.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to come out of it, to be honest.

And that's exactly the problem, it's by design to pull you into a proprietary ecosystem and squeeze you for your money. Since companies have more incentive to make things NOT work across platforms than they do to work together, we're not getting out of this mess without government regulations in the countries that matter (so, USA and Europe.... Mostly Europe...)

Case in point: Apple and USB C, or phones and removable batteries.

Right, but we all live under capitalism and have bills to pay. It's true that youtubers quite generally rely on sponsored ads to make probably most of their profit, but YouTube ad revenue still is a decent chunk of it. And that's not even getting into hosting an instance.

The only real way peertube works is if it implements some sort of subscription system (I think instance-wide subscriptions following the nebula pattern would be ideal). It's easier for text-based platforms to stay afloat with random small donations from less than 1% of users since the storage requirements aren't as egregious, but we do need to remember that even YouTube operated at a loss last I heard. It was only kept afloat by Google. Hell, even image hosting sites get the short end of the stick sometimes (still mourning gfycat), I can't imagine a free video hosting platform staying afloat at all, let alone pull serious content creators to it.

I'm not too confident in peertube ever going big, if I'm honest. I'm not confident in monolithic gif/image sites either, but that's a lot easier to self-host than a giant library of random videos that could far outgrow your system if you aren't careful. You wouldn't expect a federated free Netflix to work, would you? And yet that's a fraction of the amount of content a successful PeerTube instance could end up with if it goes anywhere near as viral as a lemmy instance. Hell, even if channels ended up hosting an instance each and not letting anyone else upload to their instance, there's some channels/companies that put out multiple videos a day every single day. No way to keep that afloat long term without a strong revenue system. Like it or not, money is always going to be an issue, especially for peertube.