I’ve stopped caring about physical sports and their broadcast literal decades ago. I only occasionally watch relatively niche sports during the Olympics (climbing for example), but that’s it.
What I do watch is eSports. More exciting than watching a bunch of people run over a field repeatedly, trying to get a ball into a things or whatever.
I assume you mean unsolicited phone calls with this? I haven’t gotten any of those in about a decade, if not more. And those were isolated cases as well. We have laws against that sort of thing. It’s not been a problem for a very very long time (early 2000s or so).
It’s only light if you configure it to be. It can be as heavy or as light as you want it to be, but it’s a good place to learn and experiment, as it’s comparatively trivial to switch stuff around. Arch wiki is probably the best Linux resource out there.
Please stop recommending mint. These days now modern alternatives are just better, especially when they might want to game even just a bit. But it’s not just shut taking, mint is kind of stuck in the past for a lot of things.
That’s impossible in the EU, they all do by law.
Friends don’t work for me. I don’t know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there’s some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it’s incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn’t well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don’t think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they’d have to know to recommend them to me).
As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven’t used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda “meh”. You can also only start out with what you have, as you’re scrobbling what you’re listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.
So as much as I wish there was, there isn’t really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same “competence”.
Having your own collection is great. But it doesn’t provide the service Spotify does (or any streaming service). 80% of the time I listen to discovery-type generated playlists. I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own. This is something you can’t self host. Even if you have a vast collection of music you don’t know (by whatever means your get it), you still need the algorithms to pick the music that you’re likely to like.
I really wish I could. I self host basically everything else. Even tried some local music similarity training for “smart playlists”. It’s kinda neat at best, but no where remotely close to the music discovery of Spotify and other online services. You need the massive amounts of users to derive that data.
And there’s heroic, but both aren’t the same thing as native platform support. Steam has game listings for games that are made for Linux and Mac. You install the official steam client and click “play”. No other platform has that.
There are more or less convenient ways to run the games from gog, epic, Amazon, … on Linux. But none of them have official support or even carry any native games at all.