I think the one that was blocked was https://www.youtube.com/@Endermanch (but they’re both up now).

It’s that, and thank you for adding that clarification, but it’s also about breaking affiliate links unless I specifically want to use one, and about breaking linked tracking: big data titans like Amazon are all selling our data to each other. If Amazon has no idea why I bought something, that’s one less piece of my data they can sell off, one less piece of data that can be used to infer my political leanings or my health situation to better manipulate me, etc. Though to be clear, I’m pretty sure the Karl Marx and Che Guevara t-shirts and Preparation H I bought for jury duty took care of much of the latter.

The rest I already stated:

This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.

I’m not buying much from Amazon, but when I do, I do it on desktop from two separate browsers. One where I am not logged in and cookies get deleted after each session, to browse, find what I want and get the link, stripped down to the basics. (That’s also where affiliate codes go to die on my machine.) If/when I actually decide to buy, I use the other browser where I am logged in but almost all scripting is disabled. To make the purchase I copy in the stripped url. If it’s more than one thing I use Notepad to store the urls in between.

It got a little harder when Amazon moved most reviews behind the sign in, but not impossible, and all this only takes an extra minute or two on desktop. Thus Amazon has no idea why I buy what I buy, only what I have actually bought. This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.

This habit started accidentally a few years back but once I saw it really cut back on all that Amazon fuckery I never went back to shopping logged in. I haven’t seen the AI tool yet, but I imagine I can probably remove it from my sight with either NoScript or uBlock Origin if I do.

As someone running two 2010 MacBooks on Linux, most of it is straightforward but I would add a few notes:

1. It was helpful for me, as someone very familiar with OSes and hardware but NOT Linux, to pull detailed hardware reports off my Macs before I wiped MacOS off all the way, and to have the specs either memorized or within easy reach whenever I started reading the technical stuff, because there’s a good bit of that unless you happen to find a first distro that matches your hardware exactly. Instead, it’s more likely you’ll kiss some frogs before you find The One. Some distros are worth the trouble of making them work, some are not, but either way know your exact specs, especially for your wifi chip, so you can recognize them when you see them mentioned.

2. If you think you may ever run MacOS on them again, for any reason, but do not have another Mac handy, go ahead and make a MacOS bootable install drive now of the latest supported OS and throw it in a drawer. I never thought I would need it, but I did it out of an abundance of precaution and ended up using it multiple times, to my own surprise. But it’s damned difficult to do without another Mac around to create the install media for you, so cover your ass and do it anyway if that MacBook is the last Mac you have.

3. I made a GParted Live USB and it’s become one of the most used USB drives I own. No matter the OS, no matter the fuckery you’ve gotten yourself into (and clearly I have), if you can boot off USB it submits to the magic of GParted. Strong recommend.

4. Know that you cannot use Ventoy on MacBooks. At all. It kept crapping out on me, I spent hours on it, but when I read the forum (and the dev’s comments to others with the same problem) turns out that nope, Ventoy does not work with MacBooks. Don’t waste your time – or do, if your nihilistic enjoyment of futility needs a strenuous workout.

5. If you don’t already have a handful of available USBs, buy a ten (or more) pack of 8GB USB drives somewhere cheap, and just start rolling. They will all get used and reused as you go about trying out various distros and then comparing the ones you liked best, and you will appreciate not having to reformat the same USB every time you want to go to something different.

6. You’ve been told about Live USBs, but the thing with these older MacBooks is that a lot of it’s just a pure crapshoot when it comes to a specific distro making happy times with your specific hardware. Usually it’s the older Broadcom wifi chips, but I’ve had other problems. So when you boot into a live trial, you really want to make sure you’re testing ALL the hardware that matters to you (wifi, Ethernet, sound, mouse, trackpad, display, camera, etc) and not just assuming.

And even then it’s not certain: I just recently put Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my mid-2010 MacBook and it sped through the Live USB trial and even the netinstall process on wifi, but as soon as it was running on the installed OS I had download speeds in the fucking bytes before I understood that the Live USB and the OS were using different Broadcom drivers. I found a guide and it was an easy enough fix, but definitely a pain in the ass. These things happen, so expect them.

7. Linux will recognize memory that MacOS will not, so go ahead and fill your actual motherboard capacity even if Apple says it’s unsupported. Chances are good you’ll want to upgrade other hardware as well; I’ve had good luck using iFixit for guides and it’s worth the trouble to ask around for recommendations on where to buy, but in general avoid Amazon, especially for batteries.

8. After you’ve installed Linux, run it on a stand for good airflow, open the case and really clean your fan, and/or replace your thermal grease (which it’s past time for anyway) because Linux does tend to run warm on these old MacBooks.

That said, these are excellent machines, a fun project, and honestly I think I like them more now than when I first got them: I never knew how versatile they could be. Hope some of this helps you.

Not saying you’re wrong, but if you’re running a VPN it could be that as well. More and more sites are demanding CAPTCHA tests and verification holds or just returning 403 for VPN access no matter what OS you are running.