After having a TCL smart TV that constantly smells like burning plastic, even a year after using it, I’m not sure I would want another of their product in my home.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.

Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.

I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.

If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.

I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.

Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.

Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.

The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.

AFAIK that’s one of the goals of the ARM (and maybe eventually RISC-V) architecture. It’s doing well on mobile and the low consumption is needed for a future that will require less energy. Or at least, do more with less. Having ARM desktops would also merge the mobile and the desktop environments.

Apple has moved to this architecture, and software wise, Linux is very compatible too. Even Microsoft knows and is trying (clumsily) to move to ARM.

The Pi5 will indeed open new possibilities on that front.

I kind of moved on to other devices or older models, depending on what is needed. If you just need a low power computer that can run Linux for simple tasks and projects, there’s now lots of alternatives. So far I’ve tried a Banana Pi BPI-M5 and a Le Potato and they’re both promising.

There’s a few instances where an original Raspberry Pi is still needed. For example, it’s super easy to install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi while not really supported on other experimental boards. Same with GPIO tinkering with some hit and miss implementation on alternative boards.

The only negative thing that I’ve began not to like about the Raspberry Pi was/is the power management and consumption on the version 4. The fact that I had to use a “dumb” USB-C charger and that everyone on forums and in comments were always “screaming” that you needed a beefier or more powerful power supply kind of killed the enthusiasm for me. Like, I can charge my laptop using a power bank and PD, while the Raspberry Pi 4 complains that it doesn’t get enough power from the same bank. I’m sure they fixed their power issues and PD negotiation in the version 5 but apparently, it will also necessitate a pretty “good” power supply because it can pump up to 25 watts. Personally I don’t need that much power for most of my projects and it’s even annoying because it significantly reduced/reduces the number of ways that I can power the board.

Still, I’ll certainly try it if I can get my hands on one. They are very nice devices and their popularity makes them very standard and compatible. But I’m not in any rush because I’ve since tried alternatives and some will also do just fine too, or even better.

Yes but it was still a P4 running Windows 7 Home Starter so whatever modern OS would choke on that anyway. I eventually gave her an old Phenom with a triple core but with the condition that it was running Linux Mint instead of Windows.

I moved a few years ago but I’m still going to help her a few times a year to do the updates. It’s very low maintenance compared to Windows.

I do tech support for a living. I once had a neighbor that is handicapped and she kept asking me why her computer was always asking her stuff and was rebooting ‘by itself’.

Turns out she had a very old computer that was using a very basic version of Windows Home (she couldn’t even change the background) and it was constantly choking and rebooting because of updates.

I installed Linux Mint on her computer and requests for support have dropped by 90%.

In fact, I have done this for a few unexperienced computer users and because they mainly just use a browser, it’s much simpler for them.

When you think about all the notifications Windows is showing to its users about everything, from antivirus to OneDrive, and all the actions its prompting, it’s easy to see how some very basic users may find that extremely confusing. For people like that, a stable Linux distribution will be bliss (and for the people helping them).

No. I’m just a “level 1” tech that have been doing this for many years, and I’ve always seen him and most of his channels as unprofessional, with the exception of the person now named Emily.

Linus himself didn’t seem like a great tech to me, mostly because he seem to struggle with anything else than Windows. I don’t care that much about hardware because I have been gravitating around hosting, mainframes (IBM i) and corporate so his channels and benchmarks are not of great interest to me. But that experience helped me see in his other tech videos that he was not serious.

And the way he “used” his employees to do anything unrelated to their job definition was weird. Like, I’m a tech and can install cable, but there’s people that you should hire for that. It’s not my job to move desks around or paint the walls while also having to do my regular tasks. Should have been the same with his employees.

He gave the impression of being someone that will use the “we’re just one big family” excuse to get his employees to do anything, while talking superficially about Windows computers and pushing merch.

I ended up asking YouTube not to recommend any of his channels.