The main ones for me are the RBC app, Skip the Dishes and Communauto. But I think those might all be Canadian?

Oh yeah that’s something I’ve been meaning to look into!

Yeah I do mine with crypto, I just got an account number and sent money, no other info exchanged. Apparently you can also just send them cash in an envelope with no identifying information and they’ll still activate your account, but I haven’t tried that yet lol.

GrapheneOS user here! Not sure about websites but there are certain apps that don’t work properly without Google Play Services, but Graphene’s app store has a sandboxed version of it, so I just installed that and revoked all it’s permissions. Then if an app needs it, I just turn on the relevant permission, do the thing and then turn permissions off again. It’s a bit of a pain at first but I’m used to it now.

Lol, what a bunch of stupid assholes.

Zero sympathy, fuck them and I hope they lose even more money in the future by still being stupid dickheads.

Good point! Now I have to figure out some way to randomize my browser nonsense…

Yeah it had 21 data points on me, and all of them except for “Browser Language: English” were incorrect. Which I guess means my setup is doing okay lol.

It’s an expected feature for me too, in that I expect Microsoft to be fucking useless at everything lol

We had a little pirate movie ring going in college - this was in the UK in the 90s and there were certain films that were banned that you couldn’t get, like Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Reservoir Dogs etc. Someone somehow had access to Swedish satellite TV and so had shitty VHS copies of them with Swedish subtitles, so we had a counterfeit ring going that passed around 3rd-generation VHS copies of all these banned films.

Then DVD arrived and all these movies were just released on regular DVD so it destroyed our whole operation lol. The Exorcist was the first movie I bought on DVD.

We didn’t really have internet access when we were at school but we’d coordinate days where someone would bring in the floppy disks for something you wanted and you’d bring in a stack of blank disks and copy them on the school computers lol.

I don’t stand behind any of it. We shouldn’t even give them an inch IMO.

It’s like magic too, because any new weird kind of package manager I add, it’s just picks it up and starts updating it. It can even update Windows apparently.

I use an unholy blend of paru, Flatpak, Docker and AppImage apps (no Snap!) with Topgrade to update it all.

I hate that we live in a world where a selfie is now an official form of ID. My bank wanted one the other day to use their app so I just deleted it lol, get fucked

I have a 2TB external drive that I got for under $200 a couple of years ago, and the other day I saw the exact same drive in Staples for $650. It’s fucking wild out there.

I have a .scripts folder in home with a bunch of things. Most of them are for backups, aka they just rsync a bunch of things from different places into one place on my backup drive. I also have one called get_trailers that I can run in my Radarr folder which takes the names of any movie folders in there and uses yt-dlp to search and grab the trailers from Youtube and puts them in the correct folders alongside the movie.

I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies “nm I fixed it” and doesn’t say what they did.

I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol

I got banned from one of the UK subreddits when someone posted a lengthy comment about why Brexit was amazing, and I responded that Brexit was idiotic. I got banned for “being political” and the person I was responding to didn’t lol.

As a side note to the general “try a bunch and see what you like” recommendations: you could also try using a virtual machine (something like Virtualbox) that lets you run a PC inside your existing PC first. That way you can try a bunch of distros without worrying about wiping your existing setup, and it’ll get you used to the install process. If you mess it up, just delete the VM and start a new one, no harm done. Then when you find one you like and feel comfortable with the install process, you can back all your stuff up and do it for real, knowing pretty much what to expect.