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.

If you configure the Mac mini with a decent amount of RAM, it will last for a decade of use.

Yes, it’s not cheap. Apple makes you pay in money, what you gain in convenience and time.

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.

macOS has far better desktop applications across the board than Linux. What you get for free with a Mac is nothing to sneeze at:

• a full office suite Pages, Keynote, Numbers, all of which are very nice. - The default PDF viewer has many functions that allow you to edit and modify PDFs easily.
• GarageBand is a full featured DAW that gets you pretty far with music making at home.
• iMovie a super easy and performant video editor.

Sure Linux has replacements for all these, but they aren’t as nice to use, reliable, or fully featured. macOS has tons of commercial and FOSS applications are available as well.

The indie software scene on the Mac is pretty strong. Omni group deserves a mention with their excellent tools. Also applications like Git Tower and Kaleidoscope are such a joy to use and powerful.

Linux attracts lots of programmers, but it’s difficult to make a living by building a good desktop application. I hope that changes.

Linux on the desktop has other strengths, especially since it lacks the enshittyfication that had plagued macOS for a couple of years now.

Microsoft and Apple see disregarding, that an OS should get out of your way and enable you to get stuff done. To them it’s more of an opportunity to seek subscription services.

Linux on the other hand costs no money. That’s a huge advantage, especially when switching.

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.

It‘s a major reason advanced users go with rolling release distros.

Sadly too many Linux distributions do that. Linux Mint didn’t for the longest time.

Use http://frogfind.de/ or https://wiby.org/ to search using old browsers.

SUsE Linux had a nice GUI installer in 2005.

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

The instance matters if you post about anything political. If your instance admins don’t like your posts, they will delete your account. Mods and admins of other instances can only ban you.

IRC was great, but it failed to progress meaningfully.

https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/nazi-concentration-and-prison-camps/421706

Thank you for his hint.

Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.

Discord similarly is an affront.

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.

You can’t post the videos Hamas records of their own deeds on YouTube either.

A control group on the juice would also be helpful.