The article also quotes

to “cheat” the system

As if people working two jobs are stealing and not working in exchange for proper value of money.

What kind of illogical comment is that? First, you bring in Microsoft to a discussion it is not a part of; second, just because Microsoft does it wrong, it doesn’t give Apple a license to do things the convoluted way too.

I used most of the stuff you listed though I usually switched to mpv instead of VLC. On Linux, I used Strawberry for quite some time though I use foobar2000 on Windows. Deadbeef is a good lightweight alternative to that on Linux but always seems to play catch up to it’s elder cousin.

That website has always been like this. They occasionally publish articles and I sometimes visit them for curiosity but more often than not, many articles are sheer garbage.

Oh, it seems like they also started their own membership thing. Wow!

hoping for improvements

There have been improvements, just on the fronts you haven’t been looking for. Also, if I am correct, torrenting over Tor would be painfully slow compared to normally doing it or via a VPN. It is not worth the hassle.

The site is actually asking me for login now via Google or something else. In recent times, many sites like Howtogeek or MakeUseOf have kinda paywalled unless you login. It works properly with adblocker (uBlock Origin) once I login though.

Oh, I understand now, especially the second one. The only thing from Amazon’s product line worth using to me is the Prime delivery service. I can’t give two hoots about their Prime Music( which I lost respect for after it denied to run for me on any browser on Linux for some reason) or Prime Video.

IIRC, YouTube Music is also offered as a standalone service, Atleast in some countries. However, the difference b/w YouTube Premium and just the Music service comes out to be miniscule, so folks just pay for the former.

Yes. Chrome OS is heavily modified(and locked down) version of Gentoo but I doubt any end users of Chrome OS want to experience vanilla Gentoo :p.

Folks who use Gentoo do out of their own choosing, not because someone recommended it. It is quite technical a distro and takes some time picking up. Void, is comparatively way easier to come to grips with than Gentoo.

Void was a great experience last time I used it. A minimal set of tools/software were installed(for some reason, I dislike ISOs/distros that fill everything from Libre Office to an FTP client in it; I will just download them if I want it), the package manager seemed pacy enough and system was fast. It is definitely one of the better distros I have tried.

Forever, no! Sure, compiling Firefox with some flags on my slow system can take ahem, time but I can install Gentoo in couple of days.

Though, in all seriousness, Gentoo takes a notch higher than Arch and unlike Arch, which has many entry level distros based on it, Gentoo has comparatively lesser. It’s fully usable but takes some initial time configuring and setting up the system exactly to the user’s requirements. The package manager is portage, I think.

I couldn’t open the article. Prompt to sign in via X site, then sign up for newsletter; it is shitty.

Coming to the article, his argument makes no sense. India’s youths don’t need to burn the midnight oil to catch up to developed countries. India has a lot of unemployed, underemployed(people having a degree higher than what they are working in; imagine having a MBA and doing a clerical job, that is common here) people.

On the contrary, I would argue there is oversupply of skilled labor in the country but not enough jobs (cough population cough). Logically, you can start instituting four week days and hire extra people. Sure, ultimately company need to pony up more but that is a logical way forward.

Oh, and there are a multitude of things that no amount of work from youths can change in India, which stop it from rising further as a country. But I will stop my rant. Suffice to say, I expected more from a man of his stature than such a statement.

Microsoft didn’t even provide a proper upgrade path for it’s users. WP7 couldn’t go to 8 and same for Windows Mobile 10.

Yes, you are correct. Bitwarden or any password manager worth it’s salt will do the job. I used to be on Keepass [the fork KeepassXC is quite good now] some years before. That being said, I thought there might be some simple about:config toggle to resolve the condition. I also wish more sites supported 2FA so that passwords stopped being the only point of vulnerability.

Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.

It is quite common, in places like the Indian subcontinent. Though I really doubt Tinder will be able to make any significant dent of it’s own in this domain here.

Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.

Yesterday, I was trying to simply automate turning on/off Wifi via Tasker at a set time. Turned out Google has removed API access for this pre Android 12 only and can’t be done. If Google wants to be make an IOS clone, then it is doing very wrong, IMO.

In android 14, they still allow sideloading via stuff like F Droid or apk’s downloaded from internet? Or does the user has to confirm a prompt everytime? At the rate Google is restricting stuff, maybe some years down the line, the only way to sideload apps would be via adb.

There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn’t streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn’t matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.

Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.

I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can’t understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.