> you're gonna carry those two Steam Decks in your pockets?
Watch me! My point was more about how expensive phones are.
I'm not so sure about modern smart phones being less fragile. My first phone was a Nokia 3310-descendent, and my second a Samsung Beat flip phone. Neither were over $100 at the time of purchase, and both were rugged devices I could throw in my pocket or in a bag without thinking it would need a protective case or that their screens were going to break.
I always have a hard time swallowing the price of modern smart phones. Having something so ridiculously expensive and fragile as an everyday carry seems absurd to me. For reference, you can buy two Steam Deck LCDs for the price of one iPhone 17.
I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
I just use Plex hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Plex Amp. I download mp3s from Bandcamp/wherever, and use beets [0] to auto-tag.
EDIT: FWIW, I don't recommend most people host their own music. Spotify/YouTube music is easy to use and has most music people want to listen to. I only self-host because I'm the type of person who has built a collection of mp3s since 2005, and the few times I tried switching to Spotify, I would commonly not be able to find specific things I wanted to listen to.
I was really close to getting a Framework earlier this year, but ultimately landed on a Thinkpad T14 Gen 5 because at the time, the price gap was significant (the Thinkpad was $250 cheaper) and the T14 still had a better CPU. Not to mention the T14 has expandable RAM, replaceable battery, screen, and keyboard, and is acceptably thin and light.
In the end, I think the Framework is worth it if you have a desire to support the company and the mission, but I think most people should go refurbished if they only care about value.
+1 to Codeberg, seems like it is the best combination of familiarity and longevity. Forgejo Actions still seems incomplete, but its Woodpecker CI seems a little more mature from what I can tell. Definitely not as fleshed out as Github Actions -- a good alternative would be to mirror your repos that require Github Actions to Github, but otherwise keep repos on Codeberg.
> I don’t see a point in spending $1500+ on a PC for diminishing returns in performance and game compatibility.
You can get a PC that can run modern games for far less than $1500; in fact, slapping a ~$200 GPU into a ~$200 office PC will get you 80% of the way there.
> It’s also common for new AAA PC releases to be much worse than their console counterparts.
The opposite is far more common from what I can tell (console versions are botched and have performance issues, f.e., Cyberpunk).
> I can cheaply buy used physical games and still have access the vast majority of the Xbox back catalog. 100% of the Xbox One library, 600+ Xbox 360 games, and 90+ Xbox games.
I can more cheaply buy digital games on Steam, have access to most of the once-Xbox-exclusive games that were inevitably ported to PC by Microsoft, and also play the thousands of PC-exclusive games. I also have access to emulators, and now, Sony is even porting their PlayStation games to PC. Also, Xbox Game Pass works on PC.
> The official Xbox Live servers for these older games are still up and maintained. It’s seamless for my non-technical friends and I to get into a COD MW2 lobby. On PC there are only community servers, and the cheaters are way more common.
I don't play Call of Duty so don't know much about that, but for most games, you will generally always have more server options and legacy game revival projects on PC.
I think the trade off makes sense if you like options. If you just want to play mainstream games like COD, consoles probably make more sense. Frankly, I'm happy that a game I bought on Steam in 2008 still works on my PC in 2024. I'm not happy that I can't play a PS3 game I bought in 2008 on my PS5.
The only way to get a W10 LTSC license for a single user is through illegitimate channels. If you look on Reddit, you can usually find out how to obtain it. The ISO itself can officially be downloaded from Microsoft servers.
> why not just use Linux full time and get a PS5/Xbox for the AAA games you can't run under Linux
A PC with Windows 10 LTSC beats PS5/Xbox in terms in game availability and backwards compatibility. It also unsurprisingly still beats Linux + Proton in terms of compability. It is still Windows after all. Console gaming is not comparable to PC gaming at this point.
Using LTSC over regular W10 affords you a more stable system since you forgo any feature updates from Microsoft (only security updates), a more lightweight and snappier system with less background services running at startup, and reduced (but still present) telemetry.
Also, I unironically like the Windows UX over the Linux compositors and countless Desktop Environments that endlessly run into compatability issues and weird bugs. W10 LTSC is comparatively far more stable.
I read that more to mean that by playing games that are non-free, you are fueling the existence of more non-free games, and thus doing damage to yourself in the sense of "freedom" since you are perpetuating non-free software. The game itself is not causing harm to you.
Watch me! My point was more about how expensive phones are.
I'm not so sure about modern smart phones being less fragile. My first phone was a Nokia 3310-descendent, and my second a Samsung Beat flip phone. Neither were over $100 at the time of purchase, and both were rugged devices I could throw in my pocket or in a bag without thinking it would need a protective case or that their screens were going to break.