Admittedly a lot of my audio stuff is either wireless or built-in now. Either laptop speakers, or bone conduction headphones since I want to hear what’s happening around me when I’m walking on the roadside. Not clear on what you mean by pre-enshittification tech, but here’s the stuff people either need explained, or look at me weird for:

• Gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• Thinkpad T430
• GrapheneOS (this one’s weird to me because it feels almost exactly like stock android?)
• A lot of my games are from itch.io for the same reason you listed for GOG, though I do use steam a lot too.
• My files are synced through syncthing between 4 locations, depending on what’s getting synced
• The fediverse in general
• Having my own website? This one confuses me because you’d think that’d be a bit more normal because of the SquareSpace ads, but nope. The idea of just… having your own website is weird to people
• The Linux terminal. I occasionally go to the library and write books in a TTY, it’s a little funny seeing people react.
• Emacs
• Pick any terminal application. Ranger, w3m, cmus, cava, etc etc.
• I occasionally play MUDs/MUSHes
• Browser games that are text/image based. The ones I’m playing now are all 20+ years old, so well pre-enshittification.
• Honestly I’ve had people think it’s weird that I download my music to play locally, even though it’s through a phone app with a relatively modern interface.

We’ll be moving into an owned home soon, and I have some plans for tech, and non-tech stuff. Can’t wait to see how many comments we get about having awnings in 2026.

If you want something similar to WordPress, but serves webpages like Hugo, Publii is also nice from what I’ve heard. Has a GUI editor, but makes static files that you just drop on a server

“Honky-tonk” in reference to the business/music genre does predate “Honky” as a term for white people. It wouldn’t surprise me if the terms are related, but I can’t find a link on a cursory search.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Honky came from Honky-tonk. Homonyms do sometimes have completely unrelated etymologies, like with the word “Pussy” meaning coward, and being a slang term for the vulva. The cowardly definition came from a shortening of the word “Pusillanimous,” while the slang term came from women being compared to cats.

Weirdly, the case. If the case is the same, my brain doesn’t register it as a new computer, but the case changing makes it feel new even if the only thing that changed is the case

I kinda think that if MS tried Palladium today, they could succeed. Their power grab just came too early.

Honestly it’s that way with a lot of tech from back then. Bonzi Buddy got sued into bankruptcy for doing less than Facebook

Arch’s recent stance on age verification, and specifically how they said it, has made me switch off of Arch for good, which is… Unfortunate, since it was the first distro I truly loved. Gentoo is what I use now, but that’s a bit farther down the line. I don’t know a good rolling release distro that’s not super inconvenient, unfortunately.

Brave is… Not great. Bad, even. I prefer Vivaldi for my Chromium fork. Mullvad browser for my Firefox fork (I also just. Refuse to use Firefox proper anymore because of their AUP). Note that one of Mullvad’s CEOs donated to a Swedish far right party, so… Make that decision how you will. It’s a free browser, so… Meh.

My default search engine is Wikipedia. When I want to use a general search engine, order of operations is Marginalia, then Startpage, but SearXNG is a good one. I just found it a bit more inconsistent.

Tuta’s a good provider, I just needed a client because I don’t check my email otherwise. I’m on mailbox.org now because of that. They’re cheaper, and private email is kind of a farce anyway. Also mailbox is cheaper, assuming Tuta doesn’t have a free plan now. Given you said you’re not using paid apps, they might?

You can’t on Lemmy, but can on mbin. I saw someone else mention just post, which will work for it, but I also just have a second account on a microblogging fedi platform for that, and that’s what I’d actually recommend for it. “You don’t need multiple accounts on the fediverse” yada yards, but there are certain instances where it’s helpful to have multiple, like this one xD

Element/Element X on mobile both seem to be missing that, and I’m predominantly on mobile for… Most chat apps now. Only exception is I do usually do discord voice calls on desktop because of push to talk. Do you know of any mobile clients that’ll do that?