Well this is a unique take. But don’t worry, there’s a Firefox for you, too. Try the ESR, or Extended Support Release, it

receives major updates on average every 52 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks.

From personal experience, 11 can’t do vertical taskbars and the hack that restores 10’s taskbar isn’t entirely bug-free and can be shut down on a whim by MS with an update removing the functionality.

From what I’ve read, 11 is a privacy nightmare with Recall and the ever-worsening insistence on having a fucking MS account to log in to your PC locally. Sorry I meant your self-serve surveilance and ad-targeting appliance.

Having to fight the anti-features and dumbing down of a piece of hardware you supposedly own to keep it usable and useful to you, not the mothership, with hacks of varying reliability… What part of that sounds like something you would want to spend any of your money or time on?

Floex - Torrid Zone (Shoulders of Giants, 2023)

And here I was holding out hope that the integration would yet improve. Although the fact that I couldn’t find the Pass + Tidal option for a recommendation a couple of months ago should have been a raging clue.

It was never perfect but was it ever handy in bringing together my 20+ year collection of non-commercial netlabel stuff, bootlegs, mashups and mixtapes that’ll never appear in public streaming and the more mainstream stuff in one place. Kept me discovering new shit all the time and got the family used to and using Plexamp thanks to the Tidal offering. Switching away from the horrible Spotify.

What now?

The hopelessness.