There’s also Deezer, SoundCloud, and others.

The reason why I stay with Spotify is sharing playlists with friends and Spotify connect supported by my HDMI receiver.

With a shared family account Spotify is also affordable.

It’s been like that that since I can remember. Upgrading can extend the lifespan by a few years, but often it’s a good idea to replace the whole system.

It depends on a lot of factors of course. If you buy a midrange machine now, you can upgrade it in five years to a high end machine from today, then five years ago.

Rarely do you get to take advantage of technology shifts like hard drives to SSD. A couple of years ago, adding more RAM and an SSD made machines usable, that had these bottlenecks. Still the best thing you can do to an old laptop or desktop.

Over the last decade performance hasn’t improved that much for most typical use cases. An i7 from ten years ago with 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD, and a NVIDIA GTX 1080 is still a decent computer today.

What makes PCs great is that you’re more flexible regarding how you configure your machine. Adding more storage, more ports, extension cards, optical drives inside your machine etc. is just nice.

With a laptop you end up with crappy hubs and lots of cables.

There are few drop in replacements. Some you might have to replace with several apps or change the way you do certain tasks.

Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and Facebook are hard to replace. Their value comes mainly from the network of the people on there.

You might be able to move communication in a friend group to a Signal group chat.

Pixelfed and Mastodon can replace them partially as well. It really depends on the audience though. If you want to connect with tech folk, mastodon can be great, if you want fashionistas, less so.

Anything using lots of video uses lots of expensive bandwidth, so the free replacements usually suffer in this category. There’s no good endless scrolling reels replacement available at the moment.

PeerTube exists for video, but it’s pretty bare bones and lacks the huge community YouTube has.

Amazon does a million things from shopping, video streaming, backend services. There are alternatives to all of these.

Media subscription services for music and video don’t have good replacements. You can go with piracy and host your own Netflix using jellyfin. Spotify is from Sweden, IIRC.

Google Drive, Dropbox, and other file hosting on the cloud have lots of alternatives, that will lack one feature or another. OpenCloud and NextCloud are the biggest names, but any hoster that gives you WebDAV can replace it partially. It also depends on your use case: cloud backup, sharing files, accessing files across devices, working on the same file, etc.

Skeumorphism is great, when used sensibly. It can give so much charm and warmth. It also gives clues on what an application is for and helps differentiate between them. Buttons looking like actual buttons is something I miss dearly.

Great that you found the solution. :)

You only need to remember that you can combine alt and shift with cursor arrows, delete, and backspace. Experiment in a text Editor and see what’s possible.

It’s been mediocre for years. I try again every year to use it for more serious work and run into limitations pretty quickly.

Deleting local timemachine backup helps. In the terminal tmutil -thinlocalsnaphots or something similar is the command.

Also use the Finder

• turn on calculate all sizes for folders
• turn on show invisible files (might need tinkerttool for that)
• open Macintosh HD in list view, sort by size

Then investigate and delete.

Signal is still pretty limited with its UI compared to Telegram and WhatsApp. More of a sideways move.

Thanks for the list of apps to avoid. None of my apps that have transitioned to Liquid Glass have become better in any way. Most are much worse. They waste space, hide functionality, and look ugly while doing it.

I think so. Using it with OrbStack was pretty easy.

SUsE Linux had a nice GUI installer in 2005.

Private key probably. Only the public key is not enough to sign the package.

The electric energy needed by the ASDEX Upgrade fusion experiment to power its magnetic field coils and plasma heating facilities is supplied by large flywheel generators. An experimentation pulse in ASDEX Upgrade requires an electric power of 400 megawatts lasting 10 seconds, i.e. half as much as the whole district of Munich. Such an abrupt grid load is not permissible; so the electric energy for ASDEX Upgrade cannot be taken directly from the grid. Instead the flywheel generators gradually take the energy needed from the grid, store it and then pass it on to ASDEX Upgrade in a single pulse.

This. It’s pretty crappy in many ways.

LFS is unlikely to run on such a machine. BSD or Xenix are appropriate operating systems.

Lemmy attracts personalities that don’t get along with IRL communities.

I mainly block communities that only repost subreddits automatically. I don’t get the point of these.

There needs to be political will behind it to break the global market dominance. China for example could decouple and build their own system. They have the technological and economic base to do it well. They are only likely to do it due to a major political crisis or change.

Other than that, it’s just very hard to compete with these established complex ecosystems.

Ah yes, the way to advocate for Linux is calling users stupid.