Onihikage

To be fair, even in my family it’s not a full streaming replacement. We have Discovery+, Nebula, and (free) YouTube. Live TV from the Roku player is the main thing I want to replace through IPTV, either Jellyfin or maybe Kodi, but both the metadata and functionality of free sources is a crapshoot. If I could replace the Roku live TV use with some inexpensive paid IPTV source, then I could easily switch to any streaming box brand, like ONN or some other generic Android TV.

My setup is not recommended, honestly. Old gaming PC from about 14 years ago with a couple extra hard drives, thrown in the closet with stripped-down Windows 10 on an old SSD, desktop version of Jellyfin, and an external drive for backups. Not even running in a Docker container because the CMOS battery is dead and getting to it is way too much of a hassle on that particular motherboard, so virtualization defaults to off whenever it completely loses power. Which it unfortunately does on occasion like winter storms, or summer heat, or if the wind is blowing.

But hey, for the movies and shows we have on DVD/BD, as well as the music we’ve bought over the years, it does work for access from PCs and phones on the local network (Finamp + Jellyfin Media Player). I dabbled with IPTV for live TV replacement but found that only using totally free IPTV+metadata would take either much more work on no-virtualization Windows 10 than I’m willing to put up with, or have much more jank than my family is willing to put up with.

It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!

The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.

The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

The Billet Labs prototype water block being so poorly handled was a consequence of them growing too big for Linus to manage; he hadn’t internalized that they weren’t six guys working out of a house anymore, but a proper medium sized business that didn’t need to strain for every bit of content to keep from going under, and could afford to slow down a little to get things right. They ended up taking a break from the constant grind to reorganize after GamersNexus put out a big piece on all the things LTT was doing wrong, all the sacrifices they were making to quality and accuracy for the sake of pushing out more and more content to stay relevant, and how badly they mishandled the prototype.

Not sure Linus has forgiven GN for the “hit piece” but I think they really needed the shock of it in order to get them to actually course correct immediately rather than keep putting it off.

Not that I know of; Bazzite is completely based on Fedora Atomic Desktops, which are an immutable type of distro that makes the core OS a read-only image that all gets updated separately from system apps. The Ubuntu equivalent of Fedora Atomic Desktops is Ubuntu Core, but I don’t know if Bazzite has a Ubuntu Core-based equivalent. Bazzite is released by a group called Universal Blue, which makes prepackaged OS builds based on Fedora Atomic Desktops, with particular focus areas. Bazzite focuses on including all gaming-related tweaks, apps, configs, and optimizations out of the box, Aurora focuses on general desktop PC functionality, and Bluefin focuses on productivity, but in the end they’re all Atomic/Immutable distros based on Fedora. It’s worth poking through it all and picking one that best suits your needs.

I switched to Bazzite not long after the Recall AI announcement, shrinking my Windows partition to leave it for just VR stuff which currently doesn’t work well outside of Windows, at least on my system. It’s pretty great! Not perfect, but the problems I have on Bazzite are similar enough in quantity and degree to problems I had on Windows that I’ve basically switched out one set of weird OS quirks for another. The big difference is now I don’t have to think about the OS being disrespectful corporate spyware.

Is Live Captions not an option?

Can confirm, I like building furniture more than I like writing code. I am… just sort of okay at both.

If it’s got N95 filters in it, but the design is flawed in such a way that air can just flow around the filters even with ideal fitment, then the mask as a whole is not N95. Now, maybe their design wasn’t flawed, we don’t actually know that, but N95 is a NIOSH standard only given to products that NIOSH has received and tested to be at a certain standard; Razer neglected to submit their masks to NIOSH in order to get an official rating. Razer could have performed their own tests and listed the level of particulates it blocks at various levels, but marketing it as an N95 respirator implied NIOSH had verified it when they hadn’t, which is fraud.

It’s a fun coincidence to me that corpophilia is one transposition away from a literal scat fetish. They may as well be the same thing, honestly.

Democratize corporations.

The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.

Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.

Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.

YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.

Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.

Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.

It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.

Windows 11 won’t install if it can’t find a TPM chip, so disabling it means you won’t get stealth-upgraded to 11 when you’re least expecting it.

The fact they killed Omegle over pretty much exactly this but it’s apparently fine when Snapchat does it makes me angry. The only difference is one of them has billionaire investors to please.

Are you sure you haven’t gotten YouTube Premium mixed up with YouTube TV? The latter is priced like traditional cable because that’s basically what it is; premium is just YouTube with no ads, basic app features that shouldn’t be paywalled in the first place like downloading videos, and YT music thrown in.

The YouTube premium family plan (pairs with more accounts/devices) is a little more expensive at like $23 but I didn’t think that was cable tv expensive. All the full-package cable replacement services I know of are around $70-$90.

FreeFileSync is FOSS and works pretty well for me. It can be set up for automated sync on a schedule or you can just manually sync files between two destinations. I haven’t really tinkered with the automated stuff but if what you want is to open up a program and hit a button to sync, it can definitely do that.