Funny story the other way around: the year is 2002 and I live in Laos. Bootlegs Everything Galore, all movies games music cost $1 or about. I discover a game, and then begins a quest to buy The Real Version because it’s a small studio and I really like it all, the storytelling, the modding tools, the community… A quest that would end up in Bangkok looking like the proverbial insane foreigner looking for the most stupid way to spend his money.

I found it eventually, in a shop that didn’t look any different among all its brothers in Pantip Plaza. Took me a while lol.

I know everybody always grandly takes on the High Seas, sailing them with lots of "arrrr“ and stuff, but I’ve found that small, quick flowing rivers oftentimes do yield a good catch.

It all works quite smoothly ; the install process is a breeze of a single .sh script to run directly from macos. The amount of software available for Arm64 is surprising, tho gamers will be disappointed there’s no Vulkan / Steam available yet.

That “Default” install is really just Fedora, shipped with KDE for it’s superior handling of fractional scaling. There’s the dnf package manager, flatpaks, the works.

I’m 80~90% of the time on the Asahi side of things on my device. Showstoppers today are sleep battery drain (50% a day) and pure “ooomph” - performance of an M2Pro chip is more akin to a 12th gen i7 than the same chip under macos. Rendering in kdenlive or blender is noticeably slower on Asahi. But it’s a huge reverse-engineering undertaking, and it will be getting better.

It’s a blog post on how to get Netflix and Spotify to work on Asahi Linux, the project to run Linux on new “M” chipsets 64bits Arm apple computers. Their solution (and widevine hack) is now integrated in the Fedora Linux Asahi Remix project’ default distro. You still have to do the user agent mod tho.

You wonderfully deviated this conversation towards the real threats we are facing in the near future, and right now. That was very well said, thank you.

OP’s premises may be not wrong on the first point, is in need of some realignment on the second, and I have no idea about the third.

The idea of a post-piracy world can still be envisioned and discussed; will it be full of FOSS and CC-BY-SA? Will it leaves us with only secondhand pulp comics while our roku devices blast 23h out of 24 of ads? Who knows?

Lifa has a lot to offer beyond screens

Yarr, mateys, all sails to the Public Library! We’ll drop anchor at the secondhand bookshop on our way back! And drop all that electronic ballast, it’s only slowing us down…

You are absolutely right; I hadn’t thought of it this way but a post-piracy world should be a frugal one, could be a quiet one. A planet-friendly one.

[??Uh, you’re getting downvoted for asking a straight question? WTF lemmies??]

There’s a difference here that I describe as “pro” meaning specialized, complex software targeted at big businesses vs individual tools of the trade: Vectorworks is gonna get paid for happily by companies needing support and relying on it for critical output, while your next door young architect will run an outdated, cracked version of AutoCAD because it’s just too expensive - that kid could (and should) run Qcad.

Where I see pirated software surviving is also as a form of legacy support: if you run old hardware (i.e. 32bits), that’s where “pro” software is gonna suck & leave you dry, while torrents are still out there.

In gaming or media, cracking looks like a sport, I feel people just want to have fun blowing restrictions to pieces. It’s heartwarming!

Back to the 'tools of the trade" category, I am happy to pay a moderate price to support a talented dev (Isadora, D::Light) but get understandably annoyed at huge businesses practicing insufferable licensing schemes. I wish people start looking, and using then supporting more alternatives out there - but isn’t photoshop still crack-able because it helps it dominate the market where The Gimp would do if it was the standard?

Dropping The List here because answering in detail would take …a very, very long time.

DRM-free ebooks. I make a point of buying them, of thanking the publisher… And not sharing it on the usual piracy channels.

ebook.com has a tickbox in its search tool to look only for drm-free books. I miss-clicked once, buying a locked book & was refunded with zero hassle.

Tachyon Publications straight out does not sell drm-locked books.

Newpapers are available in public libraries

That Fedora Spin just works. This afternoon I fired up mine to a colleague, he was blown away: I’ve got the Spinning Cube! And the Wobbly Windows! Dzoinggg!

But seriously (tho I love my Cube), kdenlive, Ardour, the works, and all on modern pipewire - just works. It’s what I need, it is indeed fantastic work, both from the Asahi team and the Fedora people.

(Yes, I had to do all those things to get Netflix, yikes)

Mac. Why the eff can I not remove StockMarket, Weather, Chess (and so many more)… On an Audio WorkStation dedicated to Studio / Live work? Even in terminal, command line from rescue mode with permissions butchered. Argh.