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Stuff like this is a good ad for Pixelfed.

The fact that Nintendo is trying to bring back literal license dongles with their Game-Key Card, when dongle DRM died in the '80s for games for a reason, eg. what if you lose your dongle? You can’t play your game that uses it anymore, don’t help matters.

Discs on PS4/XB1 and PS5/Series X are figurative license dongles, which is probably worse as a 50GB or 100GB disc respectively will have been wasted on DRM for a game you still have to download anyways, but Nintendo is using literal license dongles.

Phoronix seems pretty solid, although they’re primarily Linux-centric.

https://www.phoronix.com/

The ‘not leaving centralized services’ thing isn’t really helped when there’s basically no other viable alternatives, like is the case with YT. PeerTube exists, sure, but it’s a content desert, sadly.

Now, if PeerTube had more content to choose from…

Really though, Reddit, Meta, Twitter, and Discord all have viable decentralized alternatives in the form of Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon (Mastodon serving as an alternative for both Facebook and Twitter), and Matrix respectively, why can’t PeerTube serve as a truly viable decentralized alternative for YT?

Even Linux is in its glow-up arc as a viable Windows alternative lately ffs, and I’m glad to have been on that bandwagon for years before that platform started gaining mainstream attention.

Google’s been attacking those lately, mostly to success (Piped and Invidious are effectively dead, ViewTube is also dead, and FreeTube’s a target now).

The general point I’m trying at is just sending a newbie straight off the deep end instead of letting them in easy to start off with and letting them move on to greater challenges on their own when they feel like they’re ready for it, is going to hurt the cause of presenting Linux as a viable Windows or Mac alternative, way more than it’ll help it.

Just pointing someone just ditching Windows or Mac for the first time with no terminal experience at all, straight to Arch, Gentoo, or even Slackware, is only going to fluster them and maybe even piss them off, which the last thing you want to do when introducing someone to a new platform, is alienate them in any way as opposed to welcoming them in, which pointing them straight to a more challenging distro instead of letting them on easy with a more beginner-friendly one and letting them move on to a more challenging one when they’re ready for it, will definitely alienate potential new users.

Think of introducing someone to a new OS platform for the first time, as if you’re teaching someone how to draw for the first time, for example, ideally you’d pick fun and simple exercises to teach them the basics before going into the deeper intricacies of the subject matter at a later date if they continue to be interested in the subject matter, pointing a new Linux user to something like Debian or OpenSUSE, or even Mint so they can learn the basics of the OS platform before moving on to a more advanced distro like Arch or Slackware, is the IT equivalent of that.

I’m of the opinion that if you’re a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they’re just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.

That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I’d be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with as those are generally more beginner-friendly than Arch is.

Nothing’s stopping you from nuking your Windows install and installing some Linux distro though, at least on a normal PC. Surface products tend to be more locked to Windows though. I haven’t ran Windows as a main OS in years and don’t plan on going back, and Windows has gotten so user-hostile lately that I don’t even trust it enough to dual-boot it anymore, LTSC included.

(so far LTSC has dodged most of MS’ worst atrocities but it’s only a matter of time before that version starts getting compromised in some way too, so I don’t trust Windows outside of a VM, period, anymore, at least if I virtualize it, whatever stunts it may pull are isolated to that VM and won’t affect the host generally)

Blender at least has gotten to the point where an indie flick made with it actually won some Oscars and other big awards, so that pretty much put it on the map as a viable Maya or 3DSMax alternative, so there’s that.

No it’s not, multiplayer games with anticheat that hard-locks you into Windows and productivity software with DRM that hard-locks you into Windows is still a thing, if that were to stop being a thing, then Windows’ dominance on the desktop might finally be threatened, but until then, sadly, no.

That applies for PeerTube, Matrix, Pixelfed, and Mastodon as well.

I’d argue Lemmy and other decentralized platforms are the last bastion for free speech instead of Reddit though.

Like, since Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, PeerTube, and Matrix are decentralized, that naturally shields them from censorship somewhat compared to centralized platforms where you’re ultimately at the mercy of whoever runs that platform.

I’m not and never was banned from there, however I left on my own accord after this happened, as if all their other enshittification didn’t reinforce that decision.

And my Reddit account is now gone, I nuked it.

The current American regime is a good reason for them to not only move to whatever the data storage equivalent of a tax haven is, but also move fully to Tor/I2P to cover their tracks against any enemy powers, assuming Trump and Musk don’t figure out how to deanonymize Tor and I2P.

One more reason to use Lemmy.

Framework’s doing a pretty good job standing out for laptops anyways, with their user-repairability focus.

From what I’ve seen from other YTers, a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol on the heads seems fine, TDNC and most retro computing creators do that with floppy drives frequently to good success and the same idea applies to tape deck heads.

The recommended way of cleaning fixed heads, no matter if on a tape deck or on a floppy drive, is to just use a Q-tip with rubbing alcohol.

Helical-scan head drums like on any VCRs or any camcorders that used tape to record to, or on DAT decks and some data tape drives which used helical-scan formats like DAT/DDS or Data8/AIT, for example, are more delicate and have different recommendations for manual cleaning.

Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist.