I tried the universal firewall rules and apart from block port 80, I didn’t manage to configure it in a way to not lose connectivity. I also use Adguard DNS, which I set manually on my phone, so the DNS only mode isn’t very beneficial for me either.

How did you configure the RethinkDNS. I tried it but I don’t know how to configure the DNS not to block all my internet traffic.

Yes, I was thinking in the same direction but for me it is important for my banking app to work and don’t want to do some hacky way to trick it.

Yes, the provider is having very good coverage. Is it possible that the SIM card reader has bad contact with the SIM card and because of that to have issues with the coverage?

Man, you over complicated this task. OP, in F-Droid there are three apps that are based on a popular OCR Python library called tesseract. Just search for this term on F-Droid and give those apps a try.

You can do that fairly easy with a simple bash script and ffmpeg or bat

There are plenty of solutions out there like Tailscale, Cloudflared tunnel, Nebula, ZeroTier, etc. Yes, ISPs still prefer IPv4 and impose CGNAT, but it is mostly because IPv6 isn’t as ubiquitous as IPv4 and the world long went out of public IPv4 addresses.

Plus where I live I can do with my IPv6 whatever I please.

At the end it’s all about convenience and how much you need to tinker with something, because your free time also matters and if the effort to pirate something is higher than the price of that something then you are more likely to choose convenience. Same with Netflix.

There are more ways to help Open Source and sometimes opening well documented bug tickets with information on how the devs can replicate a problem or by improving the publicly facing documentation or opening a PR request is as valuable or even more valuable to the project as money donations.

My point is even if you guys can’t have the financial means to donate, you can still help by spending some of your free time to help an open source project and that would be equally valuable!

What about the security complications if the pirated game has some malware inside or a virus or requires the use of a keygen which is infected?

Run a live Linux from an USB, and try to play the videos from there. If some files don’t open, I would be a bit worried that they might contain a virus. You can also try to retranscode them with ffmpeg, not sure how this will work with infected files though, but maybe worth researching.

You realise that you can very easily refund Steam games if you haven’t played more than 2 hours and had the game for no more than 14 days. I know it isn’t optimal but still an option to try out a game with less risk. Plus I am usually waiting for sales to buy my games as there are very few games worth 60€ in my opinion.

You can also check https://annas-archive.org/

This eerily reminds of books burning.

Yes, the whole OOXML is one hot mess.

FreeCAD or Libre CAD, and LMMS are options, but not sure how feature rich they are.

I am not an expert but I think you can achieve some things in Linux that won’t be possible under Windows, thanks to pipewire and Jack, giving you a lot more control. I would definitely recommend you to check out JACK and pipewire. Ubuntu studio is an example of beginner-friendly Linux distribution that’s audio/video production centric that comes with everything installed and configured. If I was you I would at least check it out.

Additionally, there is a plethora of open source software, like Audacity, Mixxx, Ardour, etc.

And to be honest, the risk of using cracked software and catching malware is much higher and if you do audio production for a living I would strongly suggest you to avoid it if possible, not to mention any legal complications that might arise of using cracked software!

That’s not really the case for the majority with some exceptions of course. So which open source software has the worst UI/UX without any alternative?

Can you give me an example?

That’s Microsoft to blame. Their so-called “open” OOXML document standard is so complicated that it’s almost impossible to implement it, a very interesting read on the topic: https://tfir.io/never-use-microsofts-ooxml-pseudo-standard-format/

But I would say the Libre office should be good enough for 98% of the usage and you would hardly find any interoperability issues, due to the constant dedication of their developers who reverse engineered a lot of MS shenanigans.