Auster

Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG’s OSTs and Apple’s iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple’s music subscription, as it is DRM’d.

Since 10 y.o. is old enough to be a cutoff for me, PS Vita, and because modding community never stopped. You can even play some Android and PC games through wrappers in it. *-*

Got a gaming laptop some months ago, and it is actually very powerful indeed. But it came with Win11 by default, only requiring the final setup. Now… How can a system lag a decent laptop so much.

Needless to say, it didn’t take much for me to decide to swap for good ol’ Mint Xfce, and even try out a few other Linux systems, and now, pretty much everything runs flawlessly, at most requiring to avoid using the ultra settings.

But indeed, Windows is bloat incarnated, and it only gets worse. So much so it even feels like Win10 on a VM can clog the whole system. Weird how that doesn’t happen with Win7, no matter how long I leave it open on a VM.

Yes. ( also just remembered there are some mix up in naming conventions across the fediverse… "<.< )

Just checked your instance, and this page seems like a good start:
https://lemm.ee/communities?listingType=All&page=1

Then you can filter pages around, subscribe to pages as they pick your interest, etc.

Then, if it’s anything like Lemmy World about sorting (can’t verify since I don’t have an account in your instance), you can visit https://lemm.ee/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subscribed&page=1&sort=New to check all your subscribed contents, and by newest (I recommend “newest” because I get the impression posts start repeating themselves after a while with other sorting features).

I’d suggest Linux Mint.

• Simple UI
• (Xfce version specifically) is very fast (within reason; it’s still a modern OS)
• It’s already pretty keyboard-centric and it can be improved further if you like tinkering (my reason for dropping Windows was precisely lack of keyboard-centric controls, so if I stick to Mint, I guess it’s good on that front)
• Keys can be custom mapped, although I guess most bigger Linux systems allow that either out of the box, or through 3rd party software
• Unsure what a “dotfile” is, so can’t comment on that
• And Mint is still slowly adding animations to its functions (to some people’s dismay), and I don’t feel lag when alt-tabbing around, so I guess it is snappy too

If I may suggest, start following federated pages too. Each social media has its niche, and now, with federation that allows direct communications, it’s the perfect opportunity to find a social media whose features you like (which you seem to have already gotten), and curate your contents so it’s perfect for you without depending solely on your chosen social media’s niche.

Never understood why repeating the last word from the top text at the bottom is done in some memes.

Besides, Windows can be very laggy even on supported hardware.

Looking for a more stable distro could be a good idea. Some distros are pretty much only PoC, or too niche to have a good support, or the beta channel of another, better supported distro.

Dunno how your instance fares regarding moderation, but looking at the modlog of my instance, Kbin Social, moderators seem to act only against disruptive behavior, like spam and gratuitous offenses:
https://kbin.social/modlog

And I haven’t seem people complaining elsewhere, like on Discord, about Kbin-related instances, unlike certain Lemmy-related instances, so it appears to be fine for now.

On that matter, if you haven’t dug on the topic yet and if I may suggest, look for Linux systems (“distros”) with either the Xfce or Wayland desktop environments, since they’re some of the lightest around (Xfce being the most stable of the two, but Wayland seems pretty promising already).

Likewise from Brazil and likewise would rather see whatsapp gone from my devices. Sadly, I still need it for work and other official matters. Still, I’m slowly but surely abandoning whatsapp, by either convincing people I talk to to migrate to other, less anti-consumer services, migrating myself to sister groups or alternatives in other services, and/or abandoning a group or chat altogether. And all the while being vocal about it by raising my concerns about whatsapp (just saying “I don’t like it and you should move too” can be pretty counter-intuitive with our countrymen). Hopefully, this way, I can drop it altogether once it becomes clearly irrelevant.

But this reminds me I haven’t deleted/left any chats for a few days, so I’ll take the opportunity to do just that.

Perhaps the reasoning changes from person to person, but for me, it goes along the lines of this image posted, oddly enough, on a memes page:
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/cbae2e12-4fe0-45c4-8657-f033da6eab20.png

Looks like it was around the end of March when Valve announced the date they’d end support for Win7 and Win8. So perhaps a part of the Windows userbase went to Linux. If for fear, as a final push to drop Windows, etc., I don’t know, but perhaps they may have influenced.

Previous 12 months:

June 2023: -0.03%
May 2023: +0.15%
April 2023: +0.48%
March 2023: -0.43%
February 2023: -0.11%
January 2023: no difference
December 2023: -0.06%
November 2022: +0.16%
October 2022: +0.05%
September 2022: -0.04%
August 2022: +0.04%
July 2022: +0.05%

It would seem Linux among Steam users shows a growth tendency.
Hopefully this tendency keeps going strong!

The majority of posts on Reddit are also like that. Perhaps a curse of a feed-oriented forum (or whatever this type of social media is called)

If you absolutely must get something from Google Play, I suggest Aurora Store, which acts as an alternative frontend for Google Play, so you don’t have to have GApps installed.

If you have use for command line programs, Termux, a terminal emulator, is a great option, and it also works with root.

For reading eBooks, I also have a recommendation, Librera Reader (but I’ll check the OP’s recommendation too).

Material Files and Simple File Manager are great file browsing tools. But if you need a file browser for root specifically, I recommend Material Files specifically.

While the most recent piece of Apple technology I’ve used was a Macintosh 7, I’ve gone through similar issues with Android phones and desktop devices.

For Windows, the reliance came from the tendency of people (myself included) to avoid change, and Microsoft exploiting that, and with Android, because rare are the cases of commercial phones that don’t come with Google’s bloat.

But, upon switching to Linux and vanilla Android, as Nobuo Uematsu once said, “(…) the more limited people are, the more ingenious they begin to get (…)”. So while I had lost most tools I had in my comfort zone, it was a good opportunity for renewal, of which I took advantage.

In lights of that, my recommendation is to “take the leap” and try technologies you’re not used with, and see what you can learn from them.