And 54 cents a month is more than the ad revenue generated by a non-premium user running adblock, hence Google would prefer it.

It’s certainly the option Google would prefer, which essentially always means it’s unethical.

No, this isn’t something you can expect.

There used to be a distro called Gallium OS, but it’s been dead for a couple years now.

There are actually Chromebooks with very solid specs, but no, it isn’t that simple. They have custom firmware and components that often don’t play well with Linux, or Windows for that matter.

I can download my playlists for offline playback, which is good enough for me. That isn’t the case for everyone, of course, but the question was about one’s personal philosophy.

I never pirate games from indies or smaller publishers, but from the likes of EA, Activision, Take Two, etc? Since they’re always going to use, abuse and discard their workforce so they can keep giving the C suite their multi-million dollar annual bonuses, I will pirate their shit without an ounce of remorse.

With music, I never pirate simply because it’s more convenient to stream the music at a reasonable price. If there’s an artist or album I really love, I will buy it and/or some merch to support the artist directly.

Keep an eye out for Dell Refurbished to run one of their 50% off deals. Recently they had 9th-gen i5s with those specs in that price range, and they’re refurbished business laptops so generally higher build quality than consumer hardware.

You don’t have to buy a computer so old that it requires a lightweight Linux distro. You can find quad-core i5s with 16GB of RAM for around $300. That will run Windows 11 just fine.

Dell Refurbished often sells refurbished business laptops for absurdly cheap with discount codes. The CPU is a bit older (8th/9th gen), but still very serviceable.

Here’s an 8th gen i5/16GB/256GB laptop with a touch screen for $320.

https://www.dellrefurbished.com/item/dell-latitude-5300-touch-63228e4a/dell-latitude-5300-touch/1.html?child=dell-latitude-5300-touch-000005&p=1

My aunt is still paying those leeches $20/month. Her excuse was that she didn’t want to lose her email, but I’ve told her so many times that the email is free. I eventually just gave up trying to save her money that she’d rather burn.

Check out torrentio + realdebrid. $3/month, no need for a VPN or local storage for all the torrents you used to download.

This is the unfortunate reality at the moment. For mainstream, “frontpage”-type communities, Lemmy is fine. But for the niche, interest-based communities, it’s more or less useless.