That’s fair, but at least they could say something like “you can download our songs for as long as we allow it” and not “you can download your favourite songs and listen to them any time, anywhere” when that is only partially true, since, if someone has a playlist downloaded (still talking about personal experience) and they go offline for a long period of time, they can no longer play the songs and are required to get an internet connection only for spotify to audit and say “yeah you still have a valid subscription, you can still listen offline”. It’s not truly offline if I have to connect to the internet every once in a while.

Again, it’s completely fair, but they could at least tell more than half-truths

Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.”

this is exceptionally true from my experience with Spotify. I had downloaded a playlist that had a specific song. One day I went to play my locally downloaded playlist only to glance over it and see that the song was unavailable. I had the song downloaded. In my device and it still removed the song. No warnings, no nothing. Ever since, I downloaded everything locally and completely ditched Spotify. Fuck this scummy behaviour

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Thanks for the reply. What’s weird is that I’ve done what the endeavouros forums said (and, looking through them, they did similar steps as the ones outlined on the archwiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#Preserve_video_memory_after_suspend and I still get that black frozen screen with just a cursor. I’m guessing this is exclusively NVIDIA’s fault… or KDE’s as I never had this problem on GNOME. Thanks anyhow

I don’t think downloading directly from Spotify is possible, considering they have DRM (I might not know what I am talking about, feel free to criticize). And I tried downloading from Spotify directly using yt-dlp.

That said, spotdl seems to only download from YouTube (which is not DRM protected). So what I would recommend you do is ignore ChatGPT and use a well-known tool (such as yt-dlp) in the terminal. It is as intuitive as it gets and it does not require you to do scripting (unless you want to). And find (or create) a playlist using your YouTube account and download that using yt-dlp flags to convert the mp4 or webm files into mp3 or other

I think the docs will have what you’re looking for: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#usage-and-options and if not, good ol’ internet search is a couple keystrokes away

If you don’t know how to read code, then you pretty much have to trust them, and all other open-source software out there. The good thing with FOSS is that there’s probably someone who cares about it enough to read it and audit it, although there can also be a chance that no knowledgeable person cares about the code so no one ends up actually knowing what it’s doing.

I don’t know how to read code, so I pretty much have to trust all of the FOSS that I use. Although open-source is usually more trustworthy than proprietary counterparts (read: PRISM)

Yes. Opening PDFs might be safer on Linux, but general internet security and practice goes a long way, too. Using a content-blocker like uBlock Origin on Firefox can greatly reduce attack surface on both Linux and Windows as well

researchers from security firm Trend Micro found an encrypted binary file on a server known to be used by a group they had been tracking since 2021

Sounds like it targets servers specifically, so desktop users should be safe

No.

By installing software only from trusted sources (default repositories from your distribution are the safest software you will ever install on linux)

Say no to centralized platforms altogether. I don’t want to be that person, but things like these are exactly why open-source is (and should be) superior. It’s unfortunate that OSS has had so little traction in the end-user side of things

It’s not ChatGPT’s API. It runs locally, no internet required. For those interested read more here: https://gpt4all.io/index.html

Also, not that it matters much, but it has a strong stance towards open-source software, not allowing closed software in its repositories. Although closed software can be installed by using RPMFusion

I found this on my privacy journey. Don’t know how relevant it is today though

As ironic as this sounds, Google can’t let Firefox die because then it would become a monopoly

If you want to give it a shot I would recommend you use Podman Desktop. What I did was I just followed the instructions from the SearXNG page until I had to run it. Afterwards I would just add it to Podman Desktop. Then enter the settings to set a localhost. You can use 8080 in the localhost setting. After that I would just press run and it would start. On firefox or whatever browser you want, now enter localhost:8080 in the search bar and you have your very own searxng

Valve is and was aware of this problem even back then. I don’t have a reliable source on this but from what I remember it all started when Microsoft begun pushing the Microsoft Store.

Gabe Newell even said Linux is the future of gaming

And for this I have a source: https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-linux-and-open-source-are-the-future-of-gaming/

Exactly. uBlock Origin exists for a reason. No one can block everything, but mitigation tactics exist, and to not use a product just because the website contains trackers, I don’t understand why one would do that if the product itself doesn’t contain trackers, but hey, people are different

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My comment isn’t really a viable argument but I’ve been thinking about how an advert for Linux would be:

“The top 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux, don’t you want to feel like having a supercomputer at home? Why wait? Get your Linux for free today!”

Not really to be taken seriously, but if you want a real argument and example:

My laptop is really laggy with windows 10, and it came preinstalled with it. Recently I tried dual-booting Linux and Windows, and Windows was simply too slow. I am so accustomed with Linux’s speed that I wiped Windows off it. Never again.

Take your ignorance elsewhere