I’m not as optimistic as you.

Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.

Don’t buy a Windows key. If Windows was installed initially it should remember your hardware and activate. If it doesn’t, there’s numerous ways to pirate Windows.

Why would you hand your browsing data to the VPN company? It’s just moving the problem.

Absolutely those things are different. But the point of a search engine is to, crudely and algorithmically, sort out both.

Every (for profit)company is a monetization company. That’s the definition of a company.

I agree in this case.

But there’s a narrative that software needs regular updates or it’s worthless, but some things are just done and stable.

If it’s feature complete, a keyboard doesn’t need regular updates. According to the other thread it’s not feature complete, so it could be abandoned. Since it’s FOSS any enthusiastic person could stop it from being abandoned.

Which makes the argument that heat pumps don’t work in the cold completely wrong from a user perspective.

I disagree, a lot of white collar work is simply writing bullshit.

Probably some people, back when smartphones were novel in 2007.

At this point though, it’s tacky and implies that you don’t care enough about the conversation to turn it off.

So a property development company is developing a property. What’s the mystery?

I think it’s useful terminology, but only very generally and in hindsight. Web 1 is a pretty clear era in the 90s and early 2000s, characterized by simple static blogs and personal websites, and email. Everyone knew this would be big, but nobody figured out how, that was the dotcom bubble. Web 2 began with the rise of big tech companies like Google and Facebook in the late 2000s, it has been characterized by social media apps, centralized platforms hosting user created content, funded by targeted advertising and data mining. Web apps became possible and smartphones took over. Every product became a subscription service.

I think we’re at the start of web 3, but it’s hard to say what that is yet. The big tech companies are crumbling and there’s increasing unrest at the old system of web 2. Fed up users are turning to platforms like this. There’s a lot of demand for crypto nonsense like NFTs. AI is changing the way we do everything.

I hope that web 3 is the age of decentralization because that would be awesome, but it’s impossible to predict the future.

I love GRUB’s “Installation finished. No error reported.” Its a small thing, but you need a confident voice to tell you that everything is OK.

No, the best option is to have a usable website like every other distro. That way anyone can choose the release they want.

Nobody has an issue with there being a recommended download, that in itself is a good thing.

Kind of. My criticism is that a new user will end up with that net installer without realizing it, which may not be what they want, confusing them further. Bypassing the website is not a good solution, there’s important information there like the install guide. ISO downloads are only one example of how the website is hard to navigate, even if they manage to skip that step it’s only going go make it harder in the future.

No, it’s 0.1%. But Norway could be less than 1% of their market, so it’s somewhat significant.

I gave it another shot having not attempted for a few years, I was looking for the most complete, stable, non-free, offline, x64 image for a USB flash drive. I failed very quickly because I didn’t know whether I needed a CD or DVD image. A few minutes of clicking through random and irrelevant “FAQs” and I finally found an answer I understood but only through experience, CD images are smaller than 700mb and my flash drive is large, so I wanted a DVD image. Back to the top, and I found the image I needed.

So it took a few minutes, and I’ve done this several times before. A new user would have absolutely no clue.

Linus is negligent and well intentioned

But any of those can also include well intentioned. Well intentioned, negligent, naïve, egotistical, arrogant, focused too much on business. All are fair adjectives.

Even huge assholes are usually well intentioned (Elon Musk springs to mind), but they have a warped view of the world and get distracted by other things, and without realizing it end up doing more harm than good.