I still don’t see why we can’t just use IRC anymore. The protocol itself is old but reliable, and just needs a good client or two to help people compare it to Discord a bit more favourably. Though I suppose the need for a BNC to fully match it is probably a bit much of an ask for most.

It does still live on, somewhat, in its spiritual successor, Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org/

Its last release was in December 2022.

Brave likes to push BAT (and thus its own ads replacing the existing ones on the web) but it’s ultimately opt-out. Same with their analytics (which, in fairness, Firefox also does by default).

I’d used Linux in VMs since the early 2010s, though only really for curiosity purposes and never did much worthwhile. Got a job that uses Linux pretty extensively back in 2016 and by 2019 once I’d noticed proton was a thing I was using Arch Linux on my own laptop. Distro hopped several times in the following years and now on a new PC I’ve decided to just stay on Debian bookworm and just keep applications up to date using flatpak.