Beaver [he/him]

Napster was a godsend, as I couldn’t afford to buy music. I installed it on the school computers, and I had a sneaky little hidden folder with my mp3s. I’d plug in my headphones and listen over lunchtime. I eventually figured out how to use multipart rar files to put them onto floppy disks, so that I could get them back home and listen on my parent’s computer. I was eventually able to buy a portable CD player that played mp3s on CD-RW, which really opened up the possibilities. Without piracy, I don’t think I would be into music in the same way - I simple never would have had the opportunity to listen to most stuff.

I don’t know how they expect people to get back on their feet when they’re constantly destroying their shelter and chasing them around the city.

Good for them. Consumer co-ops can still be kind of exploitative towards their workers.

For me, the Year of Linux on the Desktop was 2021. There’s literally only one computer in the house running Windows anymore, and that’s simply to run some of the pro-level software I use for gig work (and so I’ll never be entirely rid of it).

Proton’s improvements were a big step in transitioning my PC gaming to Linux. There are still a lot of games that won’t run on Linux, but… there are so many that do, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.