Same, I got Netflix and Spotify early on, because they were cheap and novel. I now have neither for the same reasons you said. I use Anna’s Archive for ebooks and various sources for music (though I will buy music via bandcamp on bandcamp fridays if I really like the artist). It’s so much easier now to find things people are willing to share now.

I started with Debian and the spiciest thing I’ve done in almost two years of exclusive Linux usage was changing my desktop environment from Cinnamon to KDE while updating to Debian 13. I haven’t seen a need to hop around to other distros, it’s nice to search for the few problems and almost always find answers.

Exactly this. I’ve been running forums since I was a teen in the mid-00s and I’ve still got one. It’s much smaller than it used to be, but some of us have known each other for twenty years. It’s harder to find us, but occasionally someone still wanders in.

I grew up on a farm and it’s amazing that I always knew we were poor, but we always had our basic needs met. It probably contribited to me having an easy on-ramp to socialism once I moved to a city and saw the horrors of real poverty.

Relevant to the topic, we had a combine and I got to operate it to help my dad with harvesting. Crazy, very cool vehicle. It was always like magic to me.

I had a youtube channel for a few years in the early 2010s and had the same experience. I got extremely uncomfortable once people started giving me free game keys and started requesting ad reads. I ghosted my channel and eventually deleted it, but now I wish I had made a final video or something talking about the experience and why I didn’t want to participate anymore.

I fully switched to Debian in early 2024 and haven’t looked back. Highly recommend a full swap to everyone. Windows and Mac have nothing to offer.

It’s very funny to me that they mention not knowing where Yugopnik was, when he was livestreaming at the time. We got all three of them reacting to the assassination in different places.