Canon’s recent paywalling behavior if other companies start copying them, would be a good argument for picking up film again if you don’t care about video capabilities and only need stills - due to film’s analog nature, it and the gear that uses it, is immune to paywalls/DRM, and you actually own hard copies of your shots to digitize at will to boot.

Also, don’t expect Kodachrome to ever be rebooted as its process, which was proprietary and thus died with that stock, was too complex to try and bring back in the present day (although some people have tried to reverse-engineer it to varying success before).

To add to this, the same advantages of being immune to paywalls/DRM and actually owning hard copies of your work that you can digitize at will also applies to, say, drawing using real materials vs. using a digital program - your paper and pencils/crayons/what-have-you will never be affected by paywalls/DRM as they’re analog in a sense as well, and you have a hard copy you can digitize at will.

Even DRM-free storefronts like 7Digital for music or GOG for games aren’t immune to random delistings.

Objectively, dial-up.

Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.

Also, I would nominate the fact that the ‘It’s obsolete as soon as you get it in the door’ meme hasn’t been valid for decades now, but hardware manufacturers, Windows itself, and the game industry are trying really hard to make that a thing again seemingly.

This is just going to push people who aren’t locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.

Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that’s what I’m doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.

The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn’t need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can’t do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.

As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don’t run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don’t play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.

It’s only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.

Whipper is pretty much a text-based clone of EAC.

Good luck with that too, especially as GPL3 has a clause specifically forbidding tivoization built into it.

The type of thing RH is doing with the RHEL EULA in order to attempt to circumvent GPL2 protections? Yeah, that wouldn’t fly under GPL3.

The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.

Good luck, especially if they try to ban people from ripping their CDs to FLAC as well, like, how would you even find out if someone is doing that, for instance?

Unless you somehow force a backdoor into rippers like Exact Audio Copy, CUERipper, or Whipper, the latter two being OSS, you can’t.

Even SCMS never phoned home to anyone simply because the capability to do that didn’t exist yet when that copy protection scheme was first implemented, and it only applied to dubbing a CD over to DAT, MD, or DCC over S/PDIF on consumer gear.

The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there’s also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.

An i9 for a work PC? Seriously? What did they think you were going to do, compile massive amounts of code all day? Even my current CPU, an R5 4500, is probably overkill for basic office tasks (but it’s perfectly adequate for gaming on if you’re not interested in the latest AAA slop), and it’s truly a low-end part, but an i9 or R9 for basic office tasks is ridiculous.

YT’s ad revenue only pays out fractions of a penny, if you want to make money on content creation, you’re better off doing that through crowdfunding eg. with BuyMeACoffee, and that revenue stream is platform-agnostic.

Also, PeerTube’s design basically allowing you to own your content can work out well for hobbyists which already have some other income source as well, better than being at the mercy of Google.

In the case of PeerTube, not worrying about Google age-gating or straight-up yanking your content if you tick them off is a good start, basically, you’d actually own your content posting on PeerTube instead of YT.

YouTube, and one technically exists in the form of PeerTube, with PlasmaTube being a good client for PeerTube.

That’s why I consider that tagline, ‘The Land of the Free,’ to be the failed punchline of a bad joke now. It hasn’t meant anything since before Reagan took office at least.

Not Just Bikes.

NJB’s praise of their infrastructure would have me sold on them if I could actually flee the US.

Hi, and thanks!

Puppy would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.

Lessee, as far as how they operate their site goes, they pretty much destroyed all third-party front-ends by locking their API down, content-wise it varies between being a crazy place and an outright cesspit.