systemd brings much functionality. It can’t follow unix philosophy because unix is 50 years old. the whole community drama about this systemd VS sysV VS OpenRC VS whatever comes up, is funny. There are distros that are systemd-free if you wish so much to avoid it.

I work remotely, so listening mainly from my monitor’s speakers during work. After work, I recently bought a really small DAP made by shanling, and as an output I use a JBL small bluetooth speaker or oneplus buds Z2 (I bought them on sale and it was a great purchase). My music collection is a bit large (~2TB) so on my DAP I have ~100gb and it is more than enough. If I need something from my collection, I just transfer it from my pc.

I don’t really like podcasts, but I use the same DAP for audiobooks sometimes.

neovim, zsh, firefox, vlc, mpv, zsh plugins for autocomplete, ripgrep, zerotier vpn,fzf, pip3, htop, i am not sure what else

I like spotify due to the many options I have (web player, awesome mobile apps, and 3rd party clients like ncspot (cli), or psst(GUI client written in Rust)).

I have tried Tidal, but the cost seems a bit prohibitive at the end of the day. For privacy-minded/tech-savvy folks, I would say local music library is the best solution and after that, self hosting some subsonic-compatible software like https://www.navidrome.org/docs/.

I personally have a small VPS running anyways so I use gonic (https://github.com/sentriz/gonic) on the server and symfonium(https://symfonium.app/) on android as a client. So, personal music collection combined with spotify premium, is, IMO, as good as it gets.

I use lemmy.ml because i found it has a large user-base. I also like programming.dev and ideally i would like to see all the posts from the one and the other instance into one :)