tststs
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Welcome to the world of Youtube longform content, mate 
There are excellent videos by creators like Wendigoon, Dan Olson and hbomberguy with running times north of two hours. hbomberguy’s most recent video, about plagiarism on Youtube, is almost four hours long. And worth every minute.
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I don’t doubt there are some long clips which are worth watching. But I don’t care to be honest. There is so much crap on Youtube, that I usually just use it if I have to repair stuff on my 37 years old VW Bus and I have no clue how to do it. I simply have no nerves to dig through this swamp.
So I have to admit, that I haven’t watched a single minute of the video, that @vente linked. Not that I can judge the quality of the vid, but I have made my choice (at least for the next couple of years). It is KDE Plasma on top of a Debian unstable. I run that in form of siduction, because it is a reasonable form of it and has a small but very active and good forum.
KDE was, is and probably will be my DE. I can’t see anything that could even come close to satisfying my needs like Plasma.
I have had arch based disros (Antergos and Manjaro) running on my laptop for some years. But in the end I decided to run the same distro on every capable device I have.
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And, as everyone is probably aware (I hope), Youtube is Google, again.
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Yes, well aware of that that’s why I use freetube, if I use it.
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The video is actually not about promoting the system and its features, but a detailed video documenting the (rather painful) process of installing such system. It’s more of the comedy and empathy mood, and I find his struggles deeply relatable.
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Ah Ok, but from the title I guess he used a vanilla arch and a not yet very common window manager. That’s something for enthusiasts.
But I think there are videos of Win11, where you have to go into the registry just to move your taskbar from the bottom to the side of the screen. And there are for sure videos how to get rid of advertising on an OS you have to pay for by having to go to 10 different settings in different places…
Sigh
Sure, but there really is no alternative to YT. Some of the bigger content creators are moving to Nebula, a paid service which I’m thinking about subscribing to because YT/Google is of course shafting content creators who get pennies on the dollar of ad revenue.
It remains to be seen how well Nebula will do with fostering new talent though because the entry barrier to a large audience is nowhere as low as on YT which is why new creators will be cutting their teeth there for the foreseeable future.
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He uses KDE Plasma actually, and was installing Hyprland alongside it
Right. Where else can you get 300 (or more) Sophie Cunningham videos?
I haven’t really looked into Hyprland - Plasma has it’s own compositor, which is capable enough for me.
But judging from the arch wiki it shouldn’t be that hard. Even so there seem to be some work to configure it.
Still this is for advanced users, not for a Linux newbie and shouldn’t keep you away from Linux.
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Big Tech really does have us by the short and curlies doesn’t it. Their model is to get us all hooked on something cheap or free, then gradually monetize it in various ways, either explicitly or in more hidden/nefarious ways. AI is obviously the latest thing being pushed, literally.
Yes, I know we can all choose to opt out of Big Tech services and use “small tech” companies/services, but those of us who do are a minority and a fringe group in the grand scheme of things. And these small tech services are often just a more privacy-focused, perhaps more ethical alternative, but still essentially offering the same tech that Big Tech has already got us hooked on.
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Thanks for these suggestions on Gmail alternatives. These look very good. However, given that I am already paying about 60$ per year for my 10GB email from Gandi, maybe what I need is just a good email client to manage all the spam. The Gandi webmail is VERY primitive. I would think a good email client (Thunderbird?) would likely fit the bill.
Also, I would like to drop this into the thread: https://freetubeapp.io
I LOVE this app, not only because it blocks all ads, but because it offers very nice ways of organizing favorites. (It can also be set up with a proxy.) I still visit YouTube at times to give some of my favorites a thumbs up occasionally.
Now I don’t really understand, what you need. and what your strategy against spam shall be. If you have to pay 60$ for Gandi, can’t you just use different mail addresses on Gandi. At least that is my strategy.
I have a Mail Address for family and friends, two for public communication (banks and public authorities), one for trusted forums like this, three for shopping (depending on the trust level of the shops) and a last one everything else. If one of them gets messed with spam, i change it.
By the way I already linked freetube:
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I don’t know who that is, but the slop shouldn’t distract from the infrastructure Youtube provides, especially in terms of audience.
Slop? LOL, I love the Sophie Cunningham videos!
@Vente Thanks for the PTSD…I only made it through the first 6 minutes! 
Over the past 15 years or so, I have live tested, installed, uninstalled, reinstalled Linux so many times. Most recently running Kubuntu for about 2 years, until about 1.5 years ago, when I was tired of getting two heavily-used Windows-only apps to run in Linux without issues (didn’t matter what wine, or wine-like emulator I used, there always seemed to be problems), that I went back to Windows 10. Now, with Windows 10 no longer supported, and my machine “not worthy” of Win 11, I’m facing the prospect of going back to Linux. Not that I’d consider myself old, per se, but every year I feel less and less adventuress about certain things, like fiddling with an OS, and I just want ease and familiarity.
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