Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG’s OSTs and Apple’s iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple’s music subscription, as it is DRM’d.

Maybe don’t care as much? First due to the stress it causes. Second, if you pretend to be someone you’re not, people may end up liking that instead, and much like with any farce, the longer it goes, the more cracks appear.

Also, something I try to do is, without worrying much for the result, to chitchat with people. If they sound/look interested, I keep going and depending on how it evolves, I might even have gotten someone who I’m going to be hanging with for years to come. If they don’t sound or look interested, I slowly drop the attempt and try it with someone else down the line.

Iirc, there are unofficial ports of LineageOS for newer devices. Also, I’ve been using another system, ArrowOS, in its vanilla form, on a Redmi Note 10 Pro phone I have, and it’s working fine so far, so maybe an alternative for your case if you don’t find a decent phone compatible with LineageOS?

Duolinguo feels more like a very annoying ad than a learning tool, often under-explaining what it tries to teach while heavily penalizing and shaming the user for getting things wrong.

What I would suggest, other than hiring an actual teacher, would be to immerse yourself in works from their language, such as music, comics, books, movies, and so on. Also, Spain’s Real Academia Española has a dictionary+conjugator site that is VERY helpful, even for “dialects” such as the Latin America variations (link for the tool is dle.rae.es). Finding someone to try to talk to in Spanish may also help, although getting to know some of the grammar beforehand is advised.

Now, as for either free or FOSS programs specifically for learning the language, sadly, I’m not aware of any.

My “meditation” is singing along musics from power metal, symphonic metal, etc., specially the extra cheesy ones, like Blood of Bannockburn (by Sabaton), Keeper of the Celestial Flame of Abernethy (by Gloryhammer), The Phoenix (by Fall Out Boy), Defenders of Gaia (by Rhapsody of Fire), Venom of Venus (by Powerwolf), etc. Helps me with dealing with situations of pent-up stress.

Got a gaming laptop some months ago, and it is actually very powerful indeed. But it came with Win11 by default, only requiring the final setup. Now… How can a system lag a decent laptop so much.

Needless to say, it didn’t take much for me to decide to swap for good ol’ Mint Xfce, and even try out a few other Linux systems, and now, pretty much everything runs flawlessly, at most requiring to avoid using the ultra settings.

But indeed, Windows is bloat incarnated, and it only gets worse. So much so it even feels like Win10 on a VM can clog the whole system. Weird how that doesn’t happen with Win7, no matter how long I leave it open on a VM.

From what I understand, both are caused by overload, either sensory, psychological, and so on, and that result in the person having a sudden shift in their behaviors, but with the capacity of understanding one’s surroundings and to act rationally getting greatly diminished. With meltdowns, the person can display a sudden shift to a more aggressive and/or anxious behavior, maybe similar to a tantrum externally, but with the mind having gone blank. Meanwhile, shutdowns make the person go far more quiet, or unresponsive altogether.

Likewise from Brazil and likewise would rather see whatsapp gone from my devices. Sadly, I still need it for work and other official matters. Still, I’m slowly but surely abandoning whatsapp, by either convincing people I talk to to migrate to other, less anti-consumer services, migrating myself to sister groups or alternatives in other services, and/or abandoning a group or chat altogether. And all the while being vocal about it by raising my concerns about whatsapp (just saying “I don’t like it and you should move too” can be pretty counter-intuitive with our countrymen). Hopefully, this way, I can drop it altogether once it becomes clearly irrelevant.

But this reminds me I haven’t deleted/left any chats for a few days, so I’ll take the opportunity to do just that.