Exactly what I was thinking of when I made that comment. Highway maintenance is paid for, at least in part, through tolls.

If it was free, we probably wouldn’t have it because the system would have broken down with no money to fix it.

It used to not use Chromium at all.

Huh. Never realized that. I’ve only ever heard Linux users call it CLI, so I just assumed it was what most Linux users called the Terminal. And I assumed Terminal was the generic name since Mac also has a Terminal app.

Also, side note: it’s called Terminal on Windows now, too. Windows unified their Powershell and Command Prompt programs into a single app (on the surface, at least). You can open either Powershell or Command Prompt using tabs in the app.

To be fair, Windows really hasn’t pushed Powershell all that much. They haven’t even fully ported over all of Command Prompt’s commands. You have to prefix those with .\ (I think; it’s been a while) in order to get them to run even though the error message that comes up if you don’t include that will tell you, “Hey, there’s a command named this. Prefix it with that to use it.”

Now, instead of simply porting everything over, they have one app (named Terminal) running both programs.

I think it’s the Linux equivalent of Windows Command Prompt.

From the SmartTube GitHub:

install Downloader by AFTVnews on your Android TV, open it and enter kutt.it/stn_beta or kutt.it/stn_stable, then read, understand and confirm the security prompts. (You can also enter 79015 (for beta) or 28544 (for stable), but this requires an extra step to install the AFTVnews Downloader browser addon if you haven’t already.)

The AFTVnews Downloader is available on both Google Play and Amazon Fire TVs. After installing SmartTube, it can self-update on its own without needing another app.

It supports casting via the YouTube phone app (or YouTube ReVanced app).

Kodi—It can connect to a media source via FTP, so I was able to effortlessly connected it to my online storage to download shows and movies from it to watch on the fly, and on my TV no less. Without that, it’d be a huge pain just to get the file onto my TV.

SmartTube—It’s an ad-free YouTube video app for Android TVs, and it has Sponsorblock included. You could say it’s YouTube Vanced for Android TVs.

Discord bots—I’ve setup my own personal Discord server (no other humans allowed in it) and set it up with various bots that do things ranging from posting tweets/ posts from Twitter/ Bluesky to letting me know when specific channels have uploaded a new video on YouTube or gone live on Twitch. I’ve also got another bot monitoring some RSS feeds.

I recently discovered I can just have Kodi on my Fire TV use SFTP to login to my seedbox and download my shows from there.

I can’t remember the last time I got a DLL error on my Windows laptop, honestly. I don’t think that’s ever happened on my current computer.

Wasn’t ten years ago just Chrome, though?

I think you mean 20 years ago.

Wasn’t that proven to just be a myth?

So it’s Scoop, but for Linux? (That’s a compliment. I love Scoop.)

upvotes Linux meme

But my achievements…!

(I’m serious about this.)

Just an FYI for the RSS thing: if a Bluesky account is set to be viewable to logged-in users only, its RSS feed will not work. It only works if the profile is viewable publicly without logging in.

In general, yeah. Private torrent trackers tend to focus on specific types of content. Some might focus on cartoons. Some might focus on anime. Some focus on books. Some focus on video games. Public trackers, on the other hand, generally focus on everything, which, of course, means they won’t have a lot of the older or more niche stuff, and they might be lacking in one or more categories (music, anime, books, TV, etc.).

It’s also much less likely that a torrent on a private tracker will die because most private trackers enforce certain rules about seeding and because the people there are generally much more into seeding than most people on a public tracker. (Probably most people on public trackers simply download what they need and stop before seeding anything back.)

Private trackers are also typically the first (and sometimes only) places to get scene releases. Scene releases, which are done by private groups, are usually higher quality than stuff on public trackers. Sometimes, they leak onto a public tracker, but not usually.

Eh, Aniwave was a pretty big one for the anime community. From what I understand, it’s the one most people fled to after KissAnime was taken down. Aside from that, I’ve never heard of any of the other sites they mentioned.

Me waiting for the next “mothership” to pop up so I can use it: