It can be quite difficult for puzzling reasons. I bought my laptop with no OS because it was cheaper to buy a Windows license separately. I downloaded the ISO and put it on a USB drive and … It wouldn’t boot. It took me half a day and I had to follow guides with various black magic which I can’t even recall what was about to finally get the thing to boot from USB. After spending over a day on that, I installed Ubuntu and set up dual booting in about 30 minutes.

I’m not logged in because I don’t want any suggestions! I’m using ReVanced of course.

It’s Chromium underneath, so using it increases Google’s control over web standards

Well, only classically

I’m all for paying for the media I consume, but I will never pay for YouTube. First and foremost, I don’t think they pay artists enough, which is why I buy all my music albums individually on services such as Bandcamp.

Second, I believe Google is working hard on turning the internet into a privacy violating walled garden riddled with unblockable ads, where all relevant technologies and standards are de facto controlled by them. I use uBlock and reVanced to block ads on YouTube and pay content creators through Patreon because I WANT to hurt Google financially by spending their compute resources without giving them ad impressions. I think everyone should do the same.

I have 170 albums in my Bandcamp collection. I have a lot more on my mp3 collection which I have bought via other means. Each album is maybe $10 on average, so that is around $1700. I have used Bandcamp for around 8 years after 7digital closed their EU store and eMusic became trash. So that’s around $17 per month. Not a lot of money in my book, music means a lot to me!

I’ll just use this opportunity to mention kagi.com, a search engine that you pay for, but which doesn’t track you and gives you controls for customizing your search results yourself instead of letting an algorithm build a profile of your habits. I’ve used it for months now, and I’m not going back.

So much this! I don’t use Spotify, I buy all my music on Bandcamp. Sometimes I buy an album after just hearing the first song because I find it interesting, but then after a few more listens I realize that the album is not what I thought it was. However, I’m already committed because I paid for it, and it now sits at the top of my collection, so I continue to listen to it. Sometimes it turns out I find qualities in the music that I didn’t notice at the first listen, and I learn to like it. Sometimes not, and I ditch it.

This was also the way I discovered music before Spotify even existed, I just never changed my habits (I just used other services than Bandcamp back then). I think more people should try turning off the algorithmic entertainment faucet that is Spotify and try committing a bit more to the music that they listen to. Also, a lot more money goes to the artists this way, Spotify is basically stealing from the artists.

This. It costs money, but on the other hand it is FAST, looks good and ad-free. You also have the ability to block spammy domains so they just don’t show up in results.

I’m going to call it “eggs”. A tweet is now an “egg” and tweeting is “egging”.

Text is in both languages. This is common because the countries share a long border.

But there’s a picture of cheese next to the text!

Edit: it also says “cheese aroma” (“ostarom”) in Swedish.

I actually don’t have a problem paying for online services. I host my own email, I pay for Kagi search and I do monthly donations to Mozilla and Wikipedia. What I have an issue with is services that start out as advertisement based and then introduce paid plans, because now you still have all these shitty mechanics just for driving up engagement which results in unhealthy incentives for content creators and rabbit holes. I want a service that is for YouTube what Kagi is to Google Search. But perhaps that model is too difficult to monetize, I don’t know.