To an extent. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if sometime in the near future they force the use their own DNS servers within their browser instead of respecting your network configuration.

The best solution to circumventing Chrome’s bad behavior is to not use it.

Edit: speiling

As long as the record is in good condition, I find the sound comperable. I’ve played the same song on a high bitrate digital audio file and on vinyl and I found both equally pleasing to listen to.

I have a Fluance RT80 turntable, and am using the built in preamp. It’s connected to a home audio receiver (Sony STRDH590) with a 2.1 speaker setup (Polk Audio Monitor 60 Series II Floorstanding Speakers and a Polk Audio PSW10 10" Powered Subwoofer). A pretty midrange setup in others words. And I’m no audiophile, so weigh accordingly.

Edit: I realized you asked specifically about streaming. This link https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/audio-file-formats/ indicates that Spotify does up to OGG 320kbps/AC3 256kbps which is comparable to my personal audio library. So, statement holds.

I got caught up in the vinyl revival, so I enjoy collecting that media. But even then, I consider it more of a novelty.

Generally speaking though, I prefer locally stored digital media without DRM over physical media. It’s just more practical.

That being said, I’m glad that physical media exists and hope it continues to be made. Choice is good.

I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.

People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.

I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

Ublock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn’t have this problem, I assume that’s why.

Edit: autocorrect

Not literally a tamagachi, but if you want to go down the super niche rabbit hole that’ll include interfacing a TV and keyboard to a 6502 processor, there’s a guy named Ben Eater who does a great job covering that stuff. eater.net or search his name on YouTube.

Nothing too complex, no. KDE desktop, some stuff from the AUR. LVM on LUKS.

Perhaps it’s more fair to say that Arch takes more effort to maintain than any other well known distro except Gentoo (or LFS, if one considers that well known).

I found keeping up to date on a fairly bleeding edge rolling release distro exhausting. I would, too often, come across issues with updates that required manual intervention to solve. And the AUR can be a crapshoot as far maintainers keeping them up to date and applying fixes. Nothing unmanagable, but not an enjoyable experience for me.

No hate intended on Arch though. I think it’s one of the best distros out there, and the Linux community as a whole is better off for it’s existence. But it’s not something I want as my daily driver, and I suspect from what OP wrote, it might be the same case for them.

Edit: Reworded AUR bit for clarity.

Arch requires a lot of effort to maintain.

I use rsync for this purpose and the only notable bottleneck is my download speed, fwiw.

I wonder how repairable and maintainable these will be as compared to EV’s from other markets and if replacement batteries will be available as the original ones reach the end of their useful life.

If these concerns end up being valid, and the tariffs are large enough that these cars aren’t priced particularly competitively, that’d be enough for this EV consumer to pass it up for his next vehicle. Will be interested to see how it plays out.

Edit: Wanted to say I’m not against Chinese EV’s. If it ends up making sense to get one, I will.

“Peak Windows” is a fun one to ponder. I’d probably pick XP for fairly high reliability and fairly low bloat. Or 2000 if taking business oriented versions in to consideration.

You should check protondb and see if your games of choice are supported, if you’ve not done so already.

I completely jumped ship from Windows the better part of a year ago now and haven’t encountered a single game that didn’t run, at the least, reasonably well. And usually just fine OOB. Though ymmv of course.

Link for reference. https://play.date/

Re: cell phone scanning. I’ve seen these camera based book scanners popping up recently. I’ve never used one so I can’t comment on how good they are, but when I read your workflow it occured to me it was worth mentioning. Here’s a search result I arbitrarily picked listing some.

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-book-scanner#section-best-overall

It doesn’t copy data, no. Symlink is short for symbolic link. So it’s a pointer to another location. But it might be useful for you. Taking a guess at your goal, here’s a relevant example.

Say you moved all of your emulation stuff stored under /media/largehdd/retroarch. You could then symlink that directory to ~/.config/retroarch like so:

ln -s /media/largehdd/retroarch ~/.config/retroarch

That data is still stored on the large drive but will now also show under that symlinked directory.

I use file syncing (Syncthing) and symlinks to keep configs for some apps synced between devices. I don’t for Firefox, but it might work.

Could I maintain the same OS install for the life of a device? Sure. Can I resist disro hopping? Nope!

I made it, I think, 3 years on a Fedora install once.

I’m guily of the hopping on the bandwagon from Void to NixOS. But out of curiosity for NixOS not frustration over Void. Void is awesome, it fits the completely subjective picture in my head of what Linux should be.

This doesn’t fit the question exactly but I feel it’s in the same spirit, and a kind of interesting solution, I think.

Back in the early days of scryptcoin mining, I had a few gpu mining rigs running Linux. Occasionally they would hard lock and I’d have to power cycle them.

What I ended up doing is getting some usb to serial adapters, wrote a python script that ran on startup and would send a character over serial at a set interval in a loop. That was hooked up, if I recall correctly, to an attiny85 using softwareserial and some ttl to rs232 conversion. It would listen over serial and if it didn’t receive anything with a reasonable time frame it’d flip a relay that cut mains power to the pc, then flipped it back. A deadman’s switch, of a sort. It worked great!

I wouldn’t call ChromeOS Linux anymore than I would call MacOS FreeBSD (oversimplified comparison, but it works for my point).

It may be based on a Linux kernel but it contains closed source code that’s needed for essential functionality, and we don’t get to choose hardware independently of the OS, nor a different OS for the hardware.

It’s an ecosystem that’s hostile to user rights and in my opinion doesn’t fit the spirit of what Linux is.

Edit: I suppose that’s a bit gatekeeperish? But I don’t think Linux adoption should be achieved at the cost of user freedom and choice. It loses what makes it special at that point.