There is an extremely thorough (and long) video on this topic. I didn’t think I’d finish it or even watch half when I clicked it, but this guy is very informative and presents the info in a straightforward yet engaging way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpgqWZyAJtM

If you still noped out on that runtime, here is my less professional summary:

Ultimately it is about the race to the bottom of enshittification that we are experiencing in all aspects of life, and “art” transforming into “content” is chief among them. Perry’s built in audience is huge, yet one that is practically never pandered to: conservative black women. He’s not even particularly good at this and the way he does it is problematic, but it’s enough that he is attempting at all. His rise to being ridiculously OP and successful is propped up by black excellence truthers even though they may or may not actually like his content. He has spun his truly impressive success into deals with streaming services and deteriorated from mediocre to literal slop that rapidly produces enough episodes to get into syndication immediately, because the deals are signed for 100 episodes. Since he writes, directs, produces, and often acts in all these projects, and because the unknown actors do not get a chance over several years/seasons to renegotiate their contracts even if the show gets popular, he takes the lion’s share of the profits. 2 lion’s shares really.

His influence quickly squashes criticism, and rising stars are usually choked out by the machine of Perry’s media empire, bringing the attention back to him. Obviously this also affects the quality of his work.

He also makes some fascinating points about how Perry…kinda CAN’T get more deep with it. To start looking deeper about the topics he discusses would entail stripping away the patriarchy of the black Christian church, or to point a finger towards the societal problems and cycles of abuse that cause the villains of his stories (usually black men) to act the way they do. And as a true believer in capitalism and hard work=success, he can’t do that. Making his characters deeper may require addressing the ways that he’s a queer man one way or another, whether he’s gay, gender fluid, or both, which he can’t do as the church has a don’t ask don’t tell policy. So he’s stuck in a pretend world of bootstraps, one dimensional villains, where dressing up as a woman for a minstrel performance is just funny and not misogynist, an indictment, or deeper look at him in any way, and one where the moral thing to do is not only forgiving the cycles of abuse, but buying into it as a strength.

If even that is Tl; Dr: it’s the story of every other billionaire, really. He makes his money off of exploiting others. Usually young black people who are hungry for success. Just sucks that he can’t have empathy since he literally started from the bottom like the people he manipulates, unlike every other billionaire.

Eww

Photos auto upload to Ente Photos. I periodically manually back it up locally to my desktop and an external hard drive. I cut and paste directly from my phone to free storage and so I don’t have to scroll through Ente to see where I left off last backup.

General file storage like documents I use Tresorit. Mostly because it has a Linux app, otherwise I’d probably go Proton Drive. Proton Drive I use solely for game saves and whatever other random stuff I use on my Windows partition, which is not much. Similar to photos, I have a local backup on my external hard drive for important files.

I don’t back up my actual phone. I did make an app list in Notesnook, but by the time I get a new phone I tend to use the opportunity to downsize anyway. And to throw surveillance capitalism off my trail in case I made a few mistakes in not being careful over the period of owning the phone.

To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier, if you have it to spare. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you’re out of RAM you’re out if RAM. It’s less likely to happen at all on Linux though.

I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.

Got any good recommendations for Masto/microblogverse? I haven’t made an account yet.

No, and that’s the beauty of Linux.

Desktop gaming PC: Fedora KDE (might try Bazzite if I stop dual booting Windows, but I already got Nvidia set up and that’s the hard part)

Old laptop: Zorin OS

Old as dirt laptop: antiX

Wife’s Surface: Pop!_OS 22.04. Maybe change it eventually to something lighter.

I will likely go with Ubuntu Server or Debian when I set up my home server. Ubuntu seems like it has better Docker support.

I can’t agree with this. Mint, for example, is a great general use distro. It doesn’t support HDR, VRR, or even 4k 60 FPS because it’s not in Wayland. These are very basic gaming features that Windows has had for 7+ years.

Also, gaming focused doesn’t mean it has to boot into Steam Big Picture Mode and be used only for gaming. Bazzite is Fedora based, so it has RPM and flatpaks, and uses KDE, the most customizable DE. It even has a helpful onboarding Ui, and is packaged with the drivers you need for gaming. What could it possibly be missing that average users would want?

You very much need to pick a distro that has the features you want need, and the rest will follow unless it’s just a bad distro.

Deathloop doesn’t run well on Windows either.

The progression system sucks

When ECC no longer costs a mortgage, I will look into upgrading.

Admitting their mistakes makes me want to read their articles more. If only Microsoft could bring themselves to do the same.

Your technical knowledge as described is unironically far beyond the average user so I’d say you’re probably good. Depends on what you want to do though. You can occasionally have problems if you need to do something specific or are married to software that doesn’t exist on Linux. Word processing is down pat. You won’t have the app version of Microsoft Office, but there are open source alternatives like LibreOffice that are compatible with Office file types. For formatting, you may have to download some Microsoft owned fonts since they’re technically proprietary and not bundled with Linux/your office suite. In browser, Microsoft 365 and Google Docs works no differently than normal.

As someone else mentioned, you can test almost any distro on a live USB. There is also this site where you can remote in and test the general look and feel for free. You won’t have an internet connection though:

https://distrosea.com/

Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there’s no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there’s still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.

Kind of a weird example to say that people won’t online shop too. That’s far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.

Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn’t.

This would take dozens of hours though. If there were absolutely no option I would consider it but it is also absolutely useless for discovery: I have to already know it’s there and add it myself. Every time someone sends me their address, I have to add it to OSM before I can navigate to it. That is a non-starter for regular, reliable use. If I just had to add something every once in a while that would be one thing, but it’s entirely unusable.

You known what, good job Apple. You’ve been winning me over lately. I’m not sure I’d exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we’ll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.

Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!

That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.

Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It’s GRIM out there.