I really don’t understand this trend of websites working against their own users by concealing more information, stripping away the interactive and social features people used to rely on. Features we once took for granted are disappearing.

Look at YouTube, for example. First, they removed the dislike button, and now they’re inching toward changes like hiding certain metrics entirely like the ones of the picture. Xitter has taken away or restricted many core functions, and Netflix keeps reversing decisions that initially made them the go-to streaming platform.

I know a lot of people shrug and say, ‘Where else are we going to go?’ And maybe, in cases like YouTube, that’s fair since true alternatives are rare. But just passively accepting these changes only encourages platforms to keep eroding the experience. They’re free to make it worse without much consequence.

Personally, I’m cutting down on my reliance on these sites that keep ‘pulling this kind of crap.’ Sure, it means I miss out on some things, but it’s worth it to avoid all the compromises they push on us. Since YouTube cracked down on ad blockers, I’ve minimized my time on the platform. Sorry, YouTube, but I’m not waiting through the hottest indian music hit or an hour-long ad or unskippable content.

Then there’s Reddit. I’ve recently stopped using it as well, and I’d probably quit Xitter if they pushed things too far. The limits on daily views they introduced a while back already made me take a year-long break. Luckily, I haven’t found myself affected by the likes being hidden or restrictions on blocking since those aren’t features I use much, but who knows what’ll be next? Nothing is off the table if i get my experience messed up with.

I get that these are for-profit companies, aiming to increase revenue and engagement, but so many of these choices feel counterproductive. It makes me wonder, are these decisions even human-driven, or is an AI behind these changes?

Are we heading back to square one, where websites start to feel like TV channels, giving users no say in their experience? The only choice left to us is to watch or walk away.

It’s a pretty bleak outlook if you ask me. But there’s a bit of hope, sites like Neocities and the Fediverse seem to keep alive the community-driven, user-oriented internet that i'd like to see make a comeback.

The Fediverse! I have stuff to say about the fediverse... but that’s a topic for another post.

There's one and ONLY ONE reason why, despite using Bodhi Linux as my main driver for more or less one year now, there's still a dual boot system booting Windows 7 on my computer.

Well, aside from the fact that Blender for me works better on the Windows partition (but that's another story), there's only one piece of software that makes me be still kind of chained to Windows, and that's Music bee.

Probably not many people knows it since desktop music players have fallen out of preference of many people, leaving them in second place to music streaming sites, and also Musicbee is not one of the most popular ones, but i have to say it's one of the most feature filled music players that i've found ever.

It's a free music player built with the purpose of managing a large collection of music. It has a lot of options for creating a music library, and also options for managing it, you know, tag management, artwork, lyrics, it has a great way of presenting your library, it has music reencode tools AND... i think it has CD burning capabilities (i haven't checked it for sure, but it may have, it super super complete).

What's the problem with it? Well, i love it, it's the software i use to manage my music, and for now no software that i know comes closer to it in amount of features, but the problem is: it is closed source, and it's Windows only.

It is really a bummer, because every time i have to manage stuff regarding my music collection i have to boot into Windows to work into it, and believe me, i have tried several other Linux software that does similar stuff, and it always lacks features that i need.

Let me explain a bit how do i manage my music: Aside from having albums stored in their own albums and stray songs stored in genre folders, lately when talking about the music i listen the most, i have all the music files that i like and listen frequently pooled on a single folder, then i created a bunch of playlists, each one of different genres or themes.

On Music Bee it's super easy to manage, i add new music to several of the created playlists and Music bee keeps track of it, if i delete the file phisically on one playlist it deletes the file on all the playlists where that file is, and it also prevents me from adding the same file twice to a playlist.

When i finish adding files to my playlists, i just drag them to a "virtual hard disk" that i created for this purpose and Music bee copies the playlist and the new tracks to it, if the source files aren't in mp3 it transcodes them first before copying them, so i don't have to deal with multiple file formats.

I've become so used to this way of working with my music that i think i would have problems trying to do the same with other software, or all the steps involved would make it too cumbersome. so far i've tried Guayadeque (no longer maintained sadly), Quod Libet, Clementine/Strawberry and several others, and for now almost all of them suck one way of another, particularly when trying to manage large playlists or copying them to other folders/devices.

Some people would say that i could try running Music Bee on WINE, but a lot of people have problems with this too. To this day, no one has made Music bee run successfully on WINE, not at least with a lot of bugs that make it unworkable.

I'll keep trying to find another music player that i can install on Linux that allows me work on my music collection the way i want, and, who knows, maybe i could try coding it myself if the challenge is not big enough!