Why even a phone then? I'm not being facetious here it's actually a follow up on https://lemmy.ml/post/42255169/23589434 namely what do you actually need a phone for?
Maybe you are used to it and it's convenient for a lot of things you do. But do you actually need one, especially knowing that it's a legitimate threat to you?
How about no phone but a small laptop or tablet with SIM as USB dongle?
So... I'm kind of in the same situation but mine is actually by mistake. Namely my SIM somehow (OK maybe I tinkered with eSIM a bit much... anyway) works for data and SMS but not for calls. I tried to fix it a bit... then honestly I like it without. Most of the calls I received are not important, nor urgent, and the few that are can leave a message or an SMS.
I stopped relying on my phone for calls entirely and I like it.
When I tell people it doesn't work they just shrug it off and always find a way to contact me without making a big deal out of it.
I still like having a SIM though if only to
check where I am on a path the first time I get there
know if the person I'm meeting might be late
warn if I'm late on the way to somewhere
but typically my phone works well entirely offline (e.g. I do not stream music, I have actual files on my phone) so I understand.
Honestly in your shoes I'd gauge the person, if they are potentially interesting enough to explore the topic with curiosity, I'd be honest. If I just want to move on because they seem obtuse I'd keep it to the minimum.
FWIW more than a decade ago someone post "Complete list of Minecraft clones!" on r/Minecraft and they were then more than 3 dozens, at least. Also a 2s DuckDuckGo search yields https://github.com/OpenCraft-Studios/OpenCraft namely an open source alternative
So... regardless of one's opinion on it being piracy or not I'm wondering WHY even do so. WHY even "pirate" (or not) something that is basically a 1st year developer student weekend program. It's really not that complex. It can be really fun though! But... why support a dude who, already rich, sold his independent studio to a gigantic closed source for-profit corporation who now sells studio? Why not have a functional equivalent and NOT promote that thing?
Anyway, IMHO yes it is privacy, that doesn't meant it's immoral though. It can also be moral to pirate... and yet less moral than supporting free and open alternatives that do exist.
turns off SteamDeck sorry, what's a "terminal"? Isn't it at the airport?
Jokes aside... yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that's fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It's not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.
So... finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.
Oof... it actually happened to me and it's not 1 problem but 2 namely :
you ran out of disk space while updating
AND one of the messed up packages is one that is required for the upgrade process, e.g. curl or wget (sorry can't recall which it actually is)
so that leaves you in a terrible stable. You can still clean up this mess BUT that's tricky. Basically you have to
actually find out what's taking up space (often old kernels) or "just" give up on data temporarily (basically you move your /home, or part of it, to a USB stick) via rescue mode (you need to be familiar with the CLI) or remount the disk on another working system
get the actually missing packages via another working system then install locally (typically dpkg on .deb files but NOT apt get because that requires connectivity and thus packages you do not have anymore) the bare minimum you need then finish the update.
For me it was on a small temporary system (e.g. RPi for HomeAssistant) so it was basically easier to recover from a recent backup after formatting.
It's annoying but it's actually not that bad.
Edit: clarified on the broken state and dpkg vs apt get
I would recommend against a new player when existing scriptable ones like vlc and mpv already exist.
Instead what I would do is a plugin for either, eventually repackaged as its own player (if somehow installing the script itself is too much for some) for which the script would
include a very small torrent client
point that client to the torrent (which AFAICT is still not public, so for now a reconfigurable URL)
include a search function that when it fails, proposes to search within the trimmed cleaned torrent metadata then does the torrent download then plays.
Please feel free to help right now. You can still move to the EU if you want to but if you take for example NLNet they fund open source work for anybody anywhere in the World, you "just" have to propose something that is new and needed with a focus on the Internet.
a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting
So I think it is fundamental to distinguish
"AI" as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all
versus
commercialized for-profit "AI" with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.
When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.
SteamDeck, so yes.
On desktop, SBCs, servers, etc Debian.