Vic20. When I was 8 or so. It was a handmedown from my uncle. I remember writing some very basic basic while poking through the manual and playing cartridge and tape games on it. Good times!

There’s an option C:

avoid YouTube or just deal with the ads

Of course I guess it depends on which devices that that’s an option.

Commercial software: complete goals x, y, and z and get paid.

FOSS: Project of passion.

Short and black and white version: I’d rather use the software people are excited to make.

My take on what’s realistic: Things are rarely so simple. Commercial software will often (not always) be easier to use. I feel like most users don’t want to expend any more than minimal effort to effectively use their software (which I don’t think is unreasonable). So in those cases and for those users, easier = better.

Also, highly specialized commercial software might be better than any FOSS options. For example, there’s nothing in the FOSS world that can compete with the big players in commercial electronic medical records software.

So, while I love FOSS, and I find Capitalism problematic, sometimes commercial is better.

P.S: The response is more to the concept of the post. Your actual post is both well written and thought out and doesn’t feel at all like “black and white” thinking.

The YouTube adblocker battle is going to be a constantly moving target, so take this with a grain of salt as who knows when it’ll break.

I use Firefox with ublock origin and watch directly on YouTube. I don’t sign in, and I track the content I follow via rss. No ads, no nags, no issues.

Piped and similar as well as yt-dlp are also great and are better options for giving YouTube the middle finger, which I fully endorse. Just giving another option.

I don’t like helping non-tech people because they don’t want to learn. They just want it fixed. I understand the mindset and I’m that same way on other things. But I don’t want to be their “tech guy”.

I do like helping in the FOSS community though because people generally do want to learn.