You never know!

My girlfriend asked me to download her collection, too. She still didn’t give up streaming, but knowing her favs will never be taken away from her gives her some peace of mind.

Sure, just download Nicotine+ or another Soulseek client and search for the artists you’re most interested in. You won’t be able to “import library” or probe 2000 artists at once, but still, it will give you an idea. Since Soulseek is a P2P network, ideally you should keep port 2234 (or whatever you set in the client) open to see all content it has to offer. But if you can’t, no worries, you’ll still see plenty!

Might be a time to build your own music collection.

It takes some work, yes, but the result is very satisfying, and it doesn’t even have to take as much time or drive space as you imagine.

Pretty much everything else is handled already. You can:

• Have brilliant personalized music recommendations (thanks, ListenBrainz and last.fm!)
• Download dozens of millions of tracks, including very obscure ones, in two clicks (thanks, Soulseek and its amazing clients like Nicotine+, also, support indie music producers on Bandcamp and take their music from there - your money there will go much longer way!)
• Automatically add all metadata to a song, even if you have none, not even its name, in which case the sound itself will be matched against the database (thanks, Picard!)
• Host your music somewhere to build your streaming service for a lower price than your Spotify subscription (thanks, Navidrome/Subsonic/Jellyfin/Koel/…!)…
• …or just dump it into your device’s memory and choose one of the million players out there, some of them laid out in a way very familiar to streaming service users.

All of the tools (well, maybe not hosting a music server, but it’s not too hard either) are absolutely grandma-level, and you can easily install and operate them seamlessly.

And on top of it all, of course, is that no one will take your music or the ways to play it away from you. No item will ever be removed from your library (unless you yourself do it). No player will stop working with it. It’s all yours, and it’s just a bunch of .mp3/.flac files that will outlive us all.

Give it a few evenings, and you’ll never need to worry about enshittification of streaming services again. Genuinely recommending it as someone who didn’t pay a dime to streaming services in 4 years now.

Precisely because of what is described in the post.

Omarchy is an Arch-based Linux distribution created by a person with questionable political views. Many in the Linux community will go great lengths to ensure not a single penny of theirs gets into his hands.

I swear I’ve seen such headline for years now.

China committed to gradually shift from Windows to Linux on government computers. It will certainly take years, assuming it succeeds in the first place.

But still, good news they’re going for it. Hopefully we’ll see the year of Linux on Chinese PCs.

Damn, fuel is finite

Step 1. Get a lot of money

Step 2. Ignore the laws and get myself a super comfy RTG-powered hidden bunker with a Faraday cage

Step 3. Put my servers in there, take drives full of everything from the outside

Step 4. Live comfortably ever after