Well, it is technically "piracy" but it's amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

Yes, you are breaking a law. Copyright infringement in this manner is an offence under the Copyright Act 1957 punishable with up to three years imprisonment and a fine.

…but not legal. Being poor doesn’t necessarily mean you’re inclined to break the law. Besides, Linux is useful if you perhaps want to later get a job in the tech field.

That’s because even a grey market Windows key costs US$20 nowadays and that’s over ₹1,600. For comparison purposes, the largest Indian banknote is ₹500.

Getting a C/C++ compiler on Windows is a menace. To my knowledge, there are two ways to do it. Either install Visual Studio which will also install the MSVC compiler, or wrangle with MinGW to get GCC.

In the first-year CS classes I attended, the instructions were usually to either get WSL and install the gcc package or to connect using SSH to the engineering server (CentOS 7) which has it pre-installed.

They are not. I do not refer to the package called “LibreOffice”. If you search for “office” on the Windows Store, you’ll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.

The Windows Store limits the number of machines that you can install paid software on to 10. If you are managing a lot of computers you’d be better off with some actual management software or at least a package manager like Chocolatey. Then you can push software to your machines, run updates, or uninstall stuff whenever you like.

This is like the people who repackage and rebrand LibreOffice and then resell it for $10 on the Windows Store to gullible users.

And the worst part about that is that it doesn’t even break the law.

You’re technically supposed to use a human cashier lane if you have a lot of groceries. At least in the USA, it’s pretty common for self-checkout lanes to have “15 items or fewer” signs.

I used Thunderbird for a year but I don’t recommend it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a competent email client, but I’ve found that the lack of tray notifications is unbelievably annoying. That means you can’t really have it running headless in the background checking for emails. Birdtray is kind of a janky solution that I don’t recommend either.

Mailspring I’ve found has most of the features I’d need from a mail client. It also does have a real background process that can check for mail and notify you when you receive some.

The application with the best integration to your (GNOME) desktop is going to be GNOME Geary. It looks like a native GNOME app (because it is) and it fits in perfectly with your system. But it’s very light on features. If you only need a client to read and write simple messages, Geary will work wonderfully.

It’s not cool, but if you think defederation is censorship then you can switch to a different instance. This is a non-issue.

Second Jeroba tip: often times when it says submitting a comment has failed, it’s usually a lie

Spying on your competitors is as old as commerce itself

I think Lemmy needs to take a page from Reddit’s book and automatically link communities with something like “c/asklemmy”