Don’t listen to them, I installed Linux multiple times and I‘m still a fat nerd

Yea. Used it for four things. To keep up to date with creators I like, to keep up to date with friends, to keep up to date with a bunch of webcomics and to randomly rant into the void when I felt like it.

I really love our German equivalents: Harald Lesch and the show TerraX. Had the privilege of seeing him live in a guest lecture in my uni about the anthropocene. He feels so much more genuine and less arrogant than Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If you know German and don’t know him, check him out. Both on TerraX and his YouTube presence. There are even some full lectures on there, similar to the one I saw life.

It’s less begging than a “Your iCloud storage is full. Want some more?” which is fair in my books.

Ah right. Count on canonical to make my point moot.

The funny thing is, there isn’t even really a free OS with ads. At least none that I know of. Linux is open source and thus usually non commercial. Worst case you get a “please donate” the first time you log in. macOS is technically free (although you kinda subsidize it through the hardware, I suppose) and it doesn’t have ads and even chrome OS is ad free afaik. It’s really only Windows and some Android flavours, usually those running on very cheap chinese devices. And Samsung of course.

I mean, a (good) SSD is worth quite a lot, even on very old systems. I have an old 2008 MacBook laying around. It’s certainly not fast but with an SSD it’s totally useable, even on current macOS versions.

That sounds more like issues Windows would have running on an HDD (or maybe eMMC) instead of an SSD… Bit that wouldn’t explain why it got better, when you upgraded the RAM…

My experience is, that 4GB is just about useable for a bit of web browsing and similar stuff. Even on windows 11. I have an old Surface Pro 4 laying around that, in a pinch, works perfectly fine with 11. Of course, it’s not fast. But it’s totally useable.

You forget there though, that a lot of the RAM, that Windows (and most modern operating systems) uses, while idling, is a cache of programs you’re likely to open and that gets cleared, if you open something else. That has been a thing since Vista and was btw one of the reasons why Vista was criticized for high memory useage. Windows 11 is very useable with 4GB of RAM, if you’re not planning to do something bigger than browsing the web or editing a word document.

Maybe you’re not an average user then. Most people just browse the web and maybe manage some photos or fill out a document once in a while. You could do that on 4GB if you wanted to, let alone 8.

I mean, same. The difference in price for 8GB and 16GB is negligible, especially if you want dual channel on desktops

Playing devils advocate here: As someone who deals with stuff like that, you also wouldn’t buy the base model mac. The average computer user can get by with 8GB just fine and it’s not like you can’t configure Macs with more than that.

That of course doesn’t justify the abhorrent price of the upgrades…

There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…

What core features is Apple Music missing for you? The library isn’t smaller than spotify‘s (and has actually usually been a lot larger) and the lyrics feature is excellent. It even has a rather good library of official music videos.

Also, what’s your reason of having tidal, spotify and YouTube music? In my experience they do not differ so much as to warrant paying for more than one…

The problem (or at least mine) is not the concept of music streaming subscriptions but with Spotify in particular because the alternatives are in fact better in multiple ways.

Most alternatives offer lossless audio for the same price for example. On top of that, Spotify reportedly pays artist second to worst, only surpassing Amazon Music (and is still not profitable).

Besides that (although that’s opinion), their app hasn’t improved in a very long time either. Instead of building solid library management (which they had at dome point but removed) they add an overt focus on playlists and algorithm based recommendations and they make it annoyingly difficult to add titles that aren’t on the service to your library. Also, the app still does not offer a light mode.

And, since you‘ve mentioned Apple‘s shit service: They did a 180 and are currently offering what is in my opinion the best package for people who are serious about listening to music: Great organized app that still offers great algorithms and hand curated playlists and recommendations if you want to use them, however they’re not the focus, your library is. Great audio quality with most of the music being lossless and lots even hires lossless. By now they have even (almost) caught up with apps on non Apple devices: Android, PlayStation, XBox, Roku, webOS, Samsung TV, web an probably a few more. Since the last update they’ve even finally added the last feature most other services had that they didn’t: collaborative playlists.

Spotify has a few pluses, still, like even better support for more devices (better windows client, native linux client, androidTV client) and the Spotify device control feature is rather cool. However, I‘d argue the alternatives are definitely not (all) worse. I haven’t even mentioned deezer, which also has a very decent app and YouTube music, which is amazing but comes free with YouTube Premium and the ability to add any YouTube video to your playlists if what you‘re looking for isn’t in its library.

While I don’t wish for Spotify to go bankrupt and disappear, I‘d still recommend taking a look at the market once in a while. Switching services is relatively easy and the competition isn’t sleeping.

Yea but all you can eat buffets have a clear limit: The stomach size of the guests. It’s not an unlimited dinner. It’s specifically limited to the amount you can eat. (Besides that, a lot of all you can eat places have a time limit of an hour or sth).

If dropbox or google offer unlimited storage, then it’s only reasonable to use that storage. After all, that’s what you signed up for. It’s not abuse if they tell me it’s okay beforehand. As long as the terms of service don’t specify a limit, there is none. And if the terms of service do specify a limit, then unlimited is false advertising. If they don’t want you to use as much data as you like, they should have called it the 20TB plan or whatever they see as reasonable.

A way to offer unlimited storage but “cripple” it enough, so users won’t fill your server quicker than you‘d like, would be to only allow a certain size of uploads per month. So you have unlimited storage but you can only upload, say, a 100GB a month. That way, it‘d take almost a year to fill up a Terabyte and you can still claim unlimited storage. That would of course also cause backlash but you could technically still offer unlimited storage.