It's like China banning Winnie the Pooh for hurting Xi's feelings...

Until Andy Yen is made to step down from Proton and Proton disavows political alignment with any political party, rather than the PR equivalent of them "keeping their opinions to themselves", switching to Proton shouldn't be encouraged.

While I too find Linux, Arch Linux in my case due to the Steam Deck, to often be overly complicated, with operating system settings not nearly as streamlined via GUIs as on Windows, the forced switch to the enshittified Windows 11 has motivated me to set up the Steam Deck as similarly to my Windows 10 laptop as possible.

While most Windows 10 programs should work on Windows 11, I'd rather go through the hassle of switching to an OS I can trust and configure to my liking, rather than one where configuration via the Windows registry can have unintended side effects.

If program compatibility is a worry in your switch to Linux, proton, and wine as a whole, can usually let you use Windows programs on Linux; it's how most games are able to run on the Steam Deck in the first place.

In terms of Firefox, while there's a couple things I miss from my switch away from Chrome, such as network media playback support and built-in web-app functionality, better adblocking support via Manifest V2 add-ons and less to worry about in terms of data privacy make putting up with the hassle of configuring it to my liking more than worthwhile. Via the browser's chrome.css GUI configuration capabilities, I disabled several menu options and context menu items to make it more like what I had been used to in using Chrome.

*cries in American

I keep missing my chance to join AlphaRatio, so hopefully they don't end up closing...

No worries, Minesweeper's definitely a classic!

Frugal Usenet is on the same backbone as Usenet.Farm, so a better block account option would be Newsdemon on the UsenetExpress backbone. Apparently the Frugal Usenet year plan comes with a BlockNews block (Omicron backbone) as well, which seems to have a retention length closer to that of Eweka.

Edit: My mistake, only the Frugal Usenet bonus server is on the Usenet.Farm backbone.

While 'the paywall for access' argument can be made for usenet indexers (which just index NZB files, not the releases themselves, with most still allowing up to 5 downloads a day via free membership tiers), in contrast to torrenting, usenet providers cache newsgroup binaries (the actual releases) on the servers of their respective usenet backbone. Because of that, releases that might run out of active seeders on public or even private torrent trackers after a few years are sometimes available for significantly longer on usenet.

Edit: While it's not an excuse for the usenet indexers, rather the providers, usenet newsgroup binaries are downloaded directly from the servers of providers, and are thus not P2P like bittorrent is.

The best way to build ratio on TorrentLeech regardless of one's download or upload bandwidth is to use about 2GB of the initial 15GB given to new accounts to download 100 torrents that are at least 15MB, subsequently seeding those torrents 24/7 to maximize continuous TL point gain. After getting enough points you can use them to boost your ratio.

It's unreasonable in the context that while streaming services were intended to be an affordable alternative to cable without sacrificing content variety, having the same level of variety now requires four or five subscriptions. Not an issue unique to Disney, but they and other movie studios have hiked movie rental costs, along with maintaining unreasonable pricing for BluRay releases, as a means of inflating the valuation of their IP catalog.

The fact that — in contrast to having four or five subscriptions over the span of two years— it's economical to run one's own 16TB or 32TB capacity media server (and even subsequently pay for replacement hard drives as needed) demonstrates that the subscription platforms, able to run such servers far more economically per user than anyone can do themselves, are retaining excessively high profit margins in contrast to the compensation paid to the people actually involved in producing content.

Definitely true; while it would have been more fun setting up something like a Pi4 with Plasma Bigscreen to avoid content ecosystems, it seems that choosing between a Google TV or Fire TV stick or a USB-supporting BluRay player will be a more economical option. Haven't delved much into custom launchers before, but it seems that might be a good solution for the sort of minimalistic UI I'm looking for.