Get a raspi or some thinclient. Every of those sticks I’ve touched was totally crap. Slow, awful software, some come with malware preloaded and the whole experience is crap. There is enough space behind your TV for a raspi.

Keep a copy of your emulator of choice on your local computer

A few hints:

1. Start with smaller projects with simpler codebases. Do not try to understand what LibreOffice or Jellyfin are doing.
2. Maybe try to understand how one specific part of that software works. Chatbots are really, really good at explaining existing code, so ask your bot where the feature is located and let it explain it to you

First of all, many of us used Google Reader and Google shutting that down totally destroyed my trust in Google and other companies. My reader is critical infrastructure for me and I do not want some random company to screw me again. I think that many others experienced losing a valuable tool and that is why there are so many selfhosted RSS readers out there.

The bigger problem is that AI tools have ingested a lot of copyrighted and FOSS code and totally will use that code in your projects. So even if AI output can’t be copyrighted, you are still on the hook if your AI copies copyrighted code into your own project. People will notice if your project just changed the variable names

You are so wrong, I really do not know how to respond to that. Yes, not every song is on Spotify, but you are able to listen to millions of songs there. That is more than your local record shop was able to stock

Trying to remember how the world was before computers and the internet. It was really hard to look up information yet that you didn’t have in your own home. You had to hop on the bus and go to the library searching through several books. That’s one Google search today. You hadn’t had the access to music, films, and so on. You can listen to nearly every modern song on Spotify versus those few CDs you had on your home or the songs that were playing on the radio. If you want to watch a movie you can do that. You do not have to wait until it’s showing on TV with at breaks or go to some kind of rental store. You want to go somewhere, just fire up Google Maps, versus buy and paper map, figure out where you are, and still get lost. Global communication is free. Just remember how expensive long distant calls were and how you lost contact to people who moved away.

The internet and computers really have made everything easier.

Yeah - my wife has occupied for hundreds of hours the SteamDeck and really doesn’t care that it’s Linux. Her games do work. And after Microsoft switched off Win10, I moved her to Mint and she really had no issues at all with that. Everything she does still works the same. We just saved a few hundred Euros by being able to keep using the Laptop

When bending spoon buys something you are using, you should run for the exit, take your data, and search for alternatives.

It’s actually kind of crazy what amount of tech people have to use just to save a webpage for later reading.