circuitfarmer

Yes. You know when you see headlines like “internet service shut off in X country amid Y event”? It’s like that.

All of this is fleeting. If the govt decides to deny you access to anything online, they can and will. The only ones left communicating will be on radios. Backups of individual sites are great and all, and necessary, but they mean next to nothing on a grand scale if a government makes such decisions.

At this point in the timeline it is an eventuality everyone should be aware of.

Of course, there are economic reasons why internet access en masse probably won’t get shut off at the tap(s). But it may end up being the case that true, free communication, as we think of it currently, is impossible due to restrictions on speech through automoderation, or just good old coercion through fear.

+1 for Pop. I fully expected to distro hop but have had it on my main rig for over a year now. Surprisingly pleasant.

When did it die?

Streaming.

It’s the new cable, in that it sells to customers based on intentional market fragmentation. It’s actually a worse, because anything you “buy” on a streaming platform is actually just leased.

This is the right approach, but also want to mention, some sites actively block VPN IPs. Sometimes I see 403s which don’t persist if I switch servers.

The media library is the ONE reason I haven’t switched to Deadbeef. Everything else seems close enough.

Annoyingly, there is apparently an updated Medialib plugin for Deadbeef, but only on the Mac, since the dev is a Mac person.

Oops, I just commented about Foobar2k before seeing this comment.

Just want to mention that it does run on Linux as a Snap (though then you have to have a Snap installed, lol). I’m sure it runs fine with regular Wine too.

I use Foobar2000 for music. It is feature packed and so customizable. It’s available as a snap using Wine (I think it’s the only snap I have installed, in fact).

I really wish there were a Linux binary available but it has been Windows-only forever. The closest Linux player I’ve seen is Deadbeef, but Deadbeef’s library plugin does not work at all like Foobar’s (the later stays updated by monitoring the music folder and shows things by tags, not folder structure). Apparently the Deadbeef plugin is being updated to be more Foobar-like, but it isn’t there yet.

Apparently LUnix was originally designed for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I didn’t know such a thing existed for 6502-based systems.

Sounds like it’s time for me to raid the closet. The Commodore 128 is a strange beast (considering the Z80 coprocessor that effectively does nothing, unless you boot CP/M) but playing with a tiny Unix-like OS on it seems like a fun project.