I use YouTube the most of all streaming services. Yet I don’t understand why there isn’t an affordable easy to use option, that includes no ads and a high CPM for creators.

My understanding is YouTube premium, doesn’t highten the payout to creators, but rather just substitutes the dirt poor ad revenue per impression.

I’ve been using NextDNS for a while now. It’s great compared to VPN implementations like Blokada because it frees up your phone to use an actual VPN.

I’ve found PDNSQS for when I need to temporarily disable ad blocking, a really nice addition.

Things break in weird ways on Linux due to dependencies. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage has yet to show if it’s enough to fix the issue.

Where I’m from, it’s legal to download cracked games so long as you’ve bought it legitimately. Paying for games isn’t a problem, it’s treating everyone as suspects that bugs me.

It’s also part of what I want to avoid with something GUI-based/low maintenance.

I don’t really think auditing is a compelling argument for FOSS. You can hire accredited companies to audit and statically analyse closed source code, and one could argue that marketable software legally has to meet different (and stricter) criteria due to licensing (MIT, GPL, and BSD are AS IS licenses), that FOSS do not have to meet.

The most compelling argument for FOSS (for me) is that innovation is done in the open. When innovation is done in the open, more people can be compelled to learn to code, and redundant projects can be minimised (i.e. just contribute to an existing implementation, rather than inventing a new). It simply is the most efficient way to author software.

I’m probably wearing rose tinted glasses, but the garage and bedroom-coders of the past, whom developed on completely open systems moved the whole industry forward at a completely different pace than today.