I was the exact same way. I could justify watching ads to support the people I watched, but then I learned how little compensation a creator actually gets from one view and decided my time was more valuable. Plus I just got too used to never seeing ads and could never go back.

This video sums up the sentiment you’re describing nicely.

Someone will be smuggling microfiche behind the iron curtain…wait wrong century.

Windows is becoming more of a shit show everyday, comically so. Glad I finally installed Linux Mint today. I’ve used Windows exclusively up until now and just quit cold turkey, putting Mint on my daily driver. I was hesitant to upend my computer habits by swapping OS, but I should have done this ages ago. I’m sure I’ll run into some kind of issue sooner than later, but I’ll take a technical problem over one manufactured by a corporation’s greed any day.

PowerToys is so useful. It’s the main thing I will miss if I ever switch to Linux. I’m sure there is software to replace most of the functionality on Linux, but I’ve yet to get the motivation to look into it.

On the point about why they didn’t use cows instead of humans as an energy source. I think I’ve read that in the original conception of the Matrix, the humans’ brains were meant to be used for computation for the machines, rather than the humans being energy sources. This was changed since computers were new to the general public in 1999 and it was believed the concept would be too confusing.