Netflix and Spotify almost ended Piracy by making it easy to access whatever you wanted for a reasonable fee. Then they got greedy and everyone else wanted a piece of the pie and now we are in a worse position than package bundle Cable TV.

I’m in my late 30’s and went back to the high seas. I used to sail the seas in my early 20’s when i was broke AF and didn’t have cable TV. When Netflix came around it sudden became easier and more convenient to just pay $6.99/ month to watch whatever I wanted. For years I got by with Spotify and Netflix and I didn’t even look back. Then, all of a sudden there were more streaming services than i knew what to do with and every few months they would all raise their price and reduce their libraries. Then they started putting ads in. Now I’m self hosting all of my media and using Stremio/Torentio for my one off TV shows and movies. I directly support creators wherever I can as well, whether it’s Patreon or Kofi or just buying their Merch.

Canadian here. I broke my leg in January. The only thing I ended up paying for was $25 for a pair of crutches. I did have to wait a significant amount of time to get seen, but its a small hospital and someone walked in with a stab wound right after me, so I was okay with it.

We do currently have a doctor shortage in my province and I myself do not have a family doctor, which does complicate things, but there are clinics around that I can still go to that are just less personal than a family physician.

We do have to pay out of pocket for prescriptions, but generally speaking the cost for most things are pretty low. There’s also a whole bunch of basic I also have 80% drug coverage through my employer, which is pretty common as well. In addition in my province a lot of diabetes medication is provided free of charge.

The day I have to watch ads is the same day I stop youtube. So far ad blocks seem to work well for now and I’m more than willing to spend hours getting them working if needed.

Or not a teenager worried and stressed out about how and when to talk to their parents or something.

Its been 8-10 months I think. I haven’t had any major problems that weren’t caused or complicated by my own ignorance of Linux as a whole. I’ve learned a lot. I have gotten every game I wanted to play so far to run, one way or another. I set up my own home lab server for streaming and cloud storage complete with a VPN to allow remote access. I have also set up a Windows VM for some stubborn software that my partner uses from time to time (I honestly thought this would be harder than it was.) I also am in the process of indoctrinating several coworkers. I’m currently running 1 PC with Bazzite, 1 with fedora KDE, 2 with Mint, and a server running Ubuntu server and using casaOS as an interface.

I’ve really enjoyed the learning curve. My future plans were to change my server from CasaOS to something else, and to build a new gaming PC and try CachyOS, but that might get put to the side while hardware prices cool off a bit.

I went myself about ten years back when I worked for a small electronics store. It was literally 70% slop and 20% cell phone cases. There was only one company there that we actually got excited about and looked at bringing in their products. Their products were much better than what we currently carried and our current supplier was a pain in the ass to deal with.

They were imeadiatly bought out and closed by the company we already dealt with before we could even place an order. We only ever received a demo unit.

This is a much wider issue. So many people leave the default password on devices. I once installed an automatic gate with a pushbutton keypad at an airport and they wanted me to leave the default password of 0000 because it was easy to remember. I argued with them for 10 min, but they had the programming instructions and the airport manager straight up told me he’d just do it himself after I left, so I imagine that’s what happened because he seemed pretty thick and didn’t think that was an issue at all.

I had been thinking about it for a while. I had played with linux before on an old laptop, but not seriously, though I had been getting more frustrated with windows every time it updated it seemed. I then got the urged to play an old game of mine that i had picked up on a steam sale recently that i hadn’t played in years. It took hours of tinkering and web sleuthing to get it to run, then i played 20 min had to run to town, so I shut down my PC and bam. Windows update. Game no longer worked again. The next weekend I installed Linux mint, then Fedora, then the weekend Bazzite the weekend after that. The game I wanted to play on windows worked right out of the box on Proton. I’ve had less problems overall with Linux than Windows too. Most of the problems I did have early on were also self inflicted. Pro-tip don’t try to remove then re-install the lastest python manually in mint. It breaks everything apparently, luckily (unlike Windows) its very easy to re-install. It’s been about 7 months now.

I kinda started a “seedbox” for at least my niche torrents. Most of the mainstream things I download I don’t normally leave to seed that long as there’s already plenty seeding, but a lot of the documentaries or other things that only have single or double digits seeding I’ll make a copy and leave it to seed for a while. I used to host my Plex server from that PC and when I build my new dedicated server I left the storage intact, but transferred my whole library over, so I have a large amount of unused space doing nothing else.

I’m also fairly new to all this. I’m now using Jellyfin for selfhosting. What’s the benefit of enencoding everything?

A lot of people are also questioning why they even have a home PC now. Their Win 10 machine is “out of date” and they need to replace it or else, but their cell phone now does much of what their PC did. Instead of installing Linux and learning a whole new OS, they just cut out their PC and just use their phone.

Here’s the link to the docker I used. There are a few others on github, but this one seemed like it was the most actively updated.

https://github.com/sirjmann92/nicotineplus-proper

I liked slskd perfectly fine once I got it going, but I couldn’t get my partner to use it as she was used to nicotine and didn’t like the new interface. Once the Docker was set up in Portainer there was very little additional configuration and the rest was inside the nicotine webui app.

Instead of slskd I recommend using nicotine+. I found slskd worked fine, but was a pain to set up. I found a Nicotine docker that works just like the app inside a web UI. Much less of a learning curb for someone who’s not familiar with servers.

Same. Haven’t had any problems.

Also I think Tesla stock went up a bit since this whole thing started. Muskrat might just be trying to distance himself from Trump to save Tesla’s sales numbers.

Yeah. I bought it at least 5 years ago as well for fairly cheap. I ended switching a few years ago because I had problems with my IP leaking, customer service wouldn’t back to me, and I noticed the canary page went blank, so I assumed that something happened to them.

Haha. I too switched to Linux Mint last week. So far no regrets. I’ve actually enjoyed making everything I need to work. Especially because it seems to work better that on the operating system it was designed for. Strange.