That’s fair, but at least they could say something like “you can download our songs for as long as we allow it” and not “you can download your favourite songs and listen to them any time, anywhere” when that is only partially true, since, if someone has a playlist downloaded (still talking about personal experience) and they go offline for a long period of time, they can no longer play the songs and are required to get an internet connection only for spotify to audit and say “yeah you still have a valid subscription, you can still listen offline”. It’s not truly offline if I have to connect to the internet every once in a while.

Again, it’s completely fair, but they could at least tell more than half-truths

Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.”

this is exceptionally true from my experience with Spotify. I had downloaded a playlist that had a specific song. One day I went to play my locally downloaded playlist only to glance over it and see that the song was unavailable. I had the song downloaded. In my device and it still removed the song. No warnings, no nothing. Ever since, I downloaded everything locally and completely ditched Spotify. Fuck this scummy behaviour

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Thanks for the reply. What’s weird is that I’ve done what the endeavouros forums said (and, looking through them, they did similar steps as the ones outlined on the archwiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#Preserve_video_memory_after_suspend and I still get that black frozen screen with just a cursor. I’m guessing this is exclusively NVIDIA’s fault… or KDE’s as I never had this problem on GNOME. Thanks anyhow

Yeah. GNOME does this probably because it’s safer and ensures that the packages are downloaded in full before applying updates in an environment that is less likely for something to go wrong (Although I particularly don’t know how true this is)

One thing I give Linux credit for is how it handles updates. Like, yeah, Linux doesn’t force updates, that we all know, but I like how at least in the GNOME desktop, there is no “Update and action” button, there is only the shutdown and restart buttons, where if I am to press either, the system will ask me if I want to install updates or not with a nice box to tick the option. Nowhere near as cluttered as it is in the picture.

And they’re big supporters and developers of Linux

Not looking to disagree, but do you have a source on the “developers” part?

I don’t think downloading directly from Spotify is possible, considering they have DRM (I might not know what I am talking about, feel free to criticize). And I tried downloading from Spotify directly using yt-dlp.

That said, spotdl seems to only download from YouTube (which is not DRM protected). So what I would recommend you do is ignore ChatGPT and use a well-known tool (such as yt-dlp) in the terminal. It is as intuitive as it gets and it does not require you to do scripting (unless you want to). And find (or create) a playlist using your YouTube account and download that using yt-dlp flags to convert the mp4 or webm files into mp3 or other

I think the docs will have what you’re looking for: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options and if not, good ol’ internet search is a couple keystrokes away

Also, not that it matters much, but it has a strong stance towards open-source software, not allowing closed software in its repositories. Although closed software can be installed by using RPMFusion

Exactly. uBlock Origin exists for a reason. No one can block everything, but mitigation tactics exist, and to not use a product just because the website contains trackers, I don’t understand why one would do that if the product itself doesn’t contain trackers, but hey, people are different

You can backup your profile folder. See here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

If you throw proton and wine into the mix, Linux is almost as good as Windows in game support

It will most likely be explicit opt-in, if it is implemented.

[ … ] The proposal owner suggests a compromise “suggested opt-in” design, where the UI encourages the user to opt-in, but the user must explicitly make a decision to do so or not. [ … ]

Source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Telemetry#Many_users_want_to_require_opt-in_rather_than_opt-out

I agree. A lot of people went over the discussion to voice their opinions. And the proposers have adapted it since. They listen to their users, contrary to other for-profit operating systems (to reiterate, Fedora is NOT for-profit, and it never has been)

As a desktop user, I find the Linux experience to be one of constant improvement and learning. First time I tried Linux it was hard. Very hard. Now I know what I want. That doesn’t mean I don’t get to know new things every now and then. So, yes, over time you’ll acquire new skills and knowledge to deal with problems

Excuse my silly question, but what does mpv do that vlc doesn’t?

Debian is good, but if you use flatpak I recommend Fedora. They have (from my own experience) the best flatpak implementation. Although it varies from person to person

(Again, from my experience) Nvidia and Wayland works pretty well, even with the proprietary drivers. Debian has Wayland+Nvidia support since 12. see: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland

I don’t know about your other questions, sorry

I’m guessing everyone who likes GNOME (me included) only uses it because of its unique workflow. And that’s exactly why people were hesitant by GNOME 3 (besides the UI. I’m not a linux user from that time but damn the UI was weird seeing some old screenshots)

Oh, we’re enjoying it alright! Ever since Apple announced that they would kill off a service that we were using (basically to sync files between different computers and TVs) and replace it with iCloud (for which we would have to pay a lot). It was a pain trying to set it up but eventually I got it working. Very impressed at how well it does its thing.

I’d say it all depends on the user’s threat model. Seeing that part of the younger generation (myself included) are getting more caught up in technology and getting more interested in technology, in time there will be so many people using ad blockers (in fact, there already are a lot of people using ad blockers) that services like google will have to resort to other means of profit. While they try to find a solution, they will try to mitigate the thing that is preventing them from making enough profit in the meantime. In this case, adblocks. Privacy-respecting products are a thing, and some of them being used and trusted by huge corporations (an example would be Nextcloud, which is free to use).

To reclaim privacy is a very hard thing to do, but it was always meant to be this way, whether people like it or not, what drives the world is money, and user data is very profitable in today’s day and age

Luckily, there are things people can do to reclaim their privacy. It is indeed impossible to reclaim 100% of it, but people have the choice to steer away from massive surveillance that happens everywhere. Privacy is a human right that got taken away, but it can be reclaimed. People can be in control