I’m a Linux-only user of 3 years, been familiar with Linux for 5 years. No, you cannot replicate neither Windows nor Mac one to one with any Linux distro.

The problem is that there is no valid alternative at the moment, so I wouldn’t call that Stockholm sybdrome. Hosting that much content for free costs ungodly amounts of money to Google

I think it is

Metasearch engines are the way to go, I wish more people hosted their instances so folks wouldn’t run into rate limits so often

I disagree: enough people use youtube-dl and Invidious so Youtube’s legal team actually bothered to reach out to those projects. Let’s take a look at some stats:

• Invidious has 11k stars on their GitHub page https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
• NewPipe has 24k stars https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
• FreeTube (desktop app for Youtube that could either use Invidious API or scrape Youtube itself) has 7k stars https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
• Piped has 4k stars https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
• Piped also gives some stats about its userbase here https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances — over 173 thousands of registered users on the main instance!
• youtube-dl is one of the most starred projects on Github
• And all of the projects above have lots of forks

You don’t watch the ads, you don’t get tracked besides some obvious IP tracking. These two things are the whole point Google maintains the service, you know

VSCode is OSS. The builds Microsoft distributes are proprietary because of some telemetry and stuff like that but glorious volunteers maintain something called VSCodium, which is essentially the same VSCode but without the Microsoft surprises

Same. This helped me with the Linux transition a lot since I didn’t have to change my workflow completely because of other apps