Maybe, just maybe, most of the big questions have been asked and answered already.
These days when I look something up it’s been answered like 8 years ago, and the answer is still valid. And they aggressively mark questions as dupes, so people aren’t opening too many repeat questions.
That and make wages catch up with inflation. Deflation causes all sorts of problems but driving wages up just makes people wealthier.
We’ll just have to get used to bigger numbers.
LDAC works just fine on Linux, but may be a different package or repo since it’s somewhat proprietary. Just worked out of the box for me on Arch.
I think P2P has stood the test of time. Torrents scale extremely well, any large scale video would have so many peers the server wouldn’t have to participate at all. These days most torrents easily saturate my gigabit connection no problem with just a handful of peers. Torrents tends to spread like wildfire.
The main issue would be storage space, but I think a lot of YouTubers would be perfectly okay with spending $5-10 a month to pay for the storage costs with all the benefits you get from not being tied to YouTube’s ToS and policies. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the earnings from sponsor spots.
I also wanted to put an emphasis on how working with virtual disks is very much the same as real ones. Same well known utilities to copy partitions work perfectly fine. Same cgdisk/parted and dd dance as you otherwise would.
Technically if you install the arch-install-scripts package on your host, you can even install ArchLinux into a VM exactly as if you were in archiso with the comfort of your desktop environment and browser. Straight up pacstrap it directly into the virtual disk.
Even crazier is, NBD (Network Block Device) is generic so it’s not even limited to disk images. You can forward a whole ass drive from another computer over WiFi and do what you need on it, even pass it to a VM boot it up.
With enough fuckery you could even wrap the partition in a fake partition table and boot the VM off the actual partition and make it bootable by both the host and the VM at the same time.
What you’re trying to do is called a P2V (Physical to Virtual). You want to directly copy the partition as going through a file share via Linux will definitely strip some metadata Windows wants on those files.
First, make a disk image that’s big enough to hold the whole partition and 1-2 GB extra for the ESP:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 YourDiskImageName.qcow2 300G
Then you can make the image behave like a real disk using qemu-nbd:
sudo modprobe nbd
sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 YourDiskImageName.qcow2
At this point, the disk image behaves like any other disk at /dev/nbd0.
From there create a partition table, you can use cgdisk or parted or even the GUI GParted will work on it.
And finally, copy the partition over with dd:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdb3 of=/dev/nbd0p2 bs=4M status=progress
You can also copy the ESP/boot partition as well so the bootloader works.
Finally once you’re done with the disk image, unload it:
sudo qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
The graph suggests it started declining well before AI became mainstream. I’m sure it accelerates it, but it had already long peaked.