“For the first time in three years” is a weird way to phrase regular price increases.

The last good Opera version was Opera 12. With the version change to 15 and the switch from their own engine to Chromium, the entire browser became static and pointless. That’s when I switched back to Firefox.

The main concern with old hardware is probably powerdraw/efficiency, depending on how old your PC is, it might not be the best choice. But remember: companies are getting rid of old hardware fairly quickly, they can be a good choice and might be available for dirt cheap or even free.

I recently replaced my old Synology NAS from 2011 with an old Dell Optiplex 3050 workstation that companies threw away. The system draws almost twice the power (25W) compared to my old synology NAS (which only drew 13W, both with 2 spinning drives), but increase in processing power and flexibility using TrueNAS is very noticable, it allowed me to also replace an old raspberry pi (6W) that only ran pihole.

So overall, my new home-server is close in power draw to the two devices it replaced, but with an immense increase in performance.

SteamOS is a linux distro based on Arch Linux, similar to any other. It’s a amalgamation of different pieces of software, including a traditional desktop environment (plasma). But it does not boot into the desktop mode by default, instead it boots into their own graphical environment (gamemode) by default, running their steam client.

That’s because their main focus is gaming machines, and that’s why they want gamers to be greeted with a consolized, 10-foot UI.

I think you’re confused because you think of steamOS being the UI (i.e. “Desktop Environment”) that welcomes you when you boot into it, instead steamOS is the entire package, including a “traditional” desktop environment (which is KDE Plasma), as well as their own (gamemode), etc.

Which aspect of that confuses you? That it uses a Desktop Environment to do desktop things, or that they are using KDE Plasma instead of something else (say, gnome)?

Microsoft […] gets massive backlash

Pretty much since the release of Windows 10, Microsoft has been getting backlash because of the invasive, hostile and insane decisions they make and force on their users. It’s gotten particularly vocal since W11 and the EOL of Windows 10.

Yet, everybody seems to eat the plate of shit MS serves them. They complain, but most people dont seem to want to put in effort to rid themselves of Microsoft.

I could cry.

usually, they don’t actively seed, they are just part of the swarm, and request content from you. And if that content is part of e.g.their movie, they get you for distributing the movie.

Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/

I bought a kindle when amazon sold them for a special price of 25 Euro. It’s a cool device for reading books, but I found their UI horrendously cluttered and filled with “suggestions” instead of focusing on the content I already have. I have since jailbroken the device and am using koreader on the device to read my ebooks transfered as epubs via calibre.

That has the advantage that when I buy DRM-free books in epub format, I am not relying on amazon to properly convert the file to a kindle proprietary format.

The Bitrate part was a joke, yes. 96k is low, although I just remembered a special mp3 codec from NERO that allowed for such low bitrate, at the same perceived sound quality as 128kbps.

But obviously, all my CDs have been ripped as either V2, V0 or 320kbps - I personally have not noticed any difference to FLAC files with either of those qualities, I guess my ears are not sensitive enough.

honestly, most of my CDs have been used once: Put in a PC and ripped (to 96kbps MP3s, of course!)

personally i read “Down and Out in the magic Kingdom” as well as the german translation “Backup”, which - while not masterpieces - were quite enjoyable.

“old man yells at cloud”

I don’t think we can count the AUR repository as the “default package” because:

1. AUR is a community driven project, for users, by users. Repos are not maintained by the Arch team.
2. Arch user needs to explicitely get out of their way to access and use AUR, it is not enabled by default
3. AUR repos are not even packages (usually). They are build-instructions. There are specific -bin repos that provide packaged binaries, but that was not the case here, because the emulators license doesn’t allow that.

The issue here was that stenzek moved the emulator to a source-available license, which does not allow Arch to provide packages in their package repo. So people were using build instructions to build the emulator from source. And when that caused issues because something broke, people came to stenzek for support instead of the person maintaining the build instrucions.