Well, they can be simultaneously true if one person has a terrible experience because of Nvidia and another person with an all amd build who happens to have a Linux friendly touchpad (is that still a problem these days?) might have a perfect experience out of the box.

I think that’s a major weakness, that windows will be good or bad in various ways but it’s very consistent - the things that suck usually suck for everyone. With Linux everything depends, not only on hardware but with your use case, the distro you pick, the tools you use, etc.

After I check the usual torrent sites, if I can’t find it on Usenet then I try finding random sketchy streaming sites (just by duckduckgoing title + year + stream) because usually you can youtube-dl them with a little fiddling, then my last resort is a DHT indexer like btdig. That’s more risk with viruses but if you’re paying attention it’s not that hard to avoid, but DHT indexes have lots of ancient stuff so be prepared to wait for seeds if you find it.

Sometimes I also find what I’m looking for on like page 7 of duckduckgo results at archive.org

Edit: also check soulseek - it’s primarily for music but you can share any file. I share my entire movies collection and get a constant stream of people downloading from me daily so it seems people search for and seem to also share TV and movies so it’s worth a check.

Seconding this, I also get a lot less ads with S0undtv and to get rid of the rest I just VPN to an ad free country and it works flawlessly.

We’re seeing this at work too - our public git frontend is constantly getting scraped as well as our self hosted issue tracker. We had to spend days working on fail2ban and other kinds of tools to mitigate all the traffic that’s adding tons of load to our instances, which otherwise would easily be able to handle the handful of employees who actually use these systems.