You can serve ads without any of the invasive tracking, and you can have paid access without any of the invasive tracking...
I don't think most people actually think digital things should be free, just that they're not invasive data-hoarding piles of crap.
Life isn't supposed to be expensive. Life is, in fact, free
And you are able to live without that car/service/thingy-madoo that costs money...all completely free.
Commodities and luxuries however do cost money to obtain and use...
It's a 9 year old laptop, so things really should be ironed out on the HW side IMO. It didn't have issues last i used ubuntu, think it was 18.04 i used back then.
You'd think they had hardware support for a 9 year old laptop done by now...
I recently tried ubuntu on my laptop, every time i brought it back from sleep/hibernation my touchpad wasn't working and i had to reboot. It's been a few years since i used it last, i was expecting significantly better stability than that...
Its simply to avoid handing out my real phone number to companies so they can use it to match data from other datasets that link it to me. If im giving them my real phone number, i might as well also just give them my real email and not an alias.
Since i started getting in to online privacy, I've been stuck in captcha-purgatory a lot...it just keeps loading a never ending stream of new captchas for me to solve.
That's certainly a different approach than what I do.
A google service doesn't really inspire trust in privacy? I'm trying to move away from Google services as much as possible.
None of that is an argument as to why they should track people. You even mention why its not a problem not having tracking, since they can just increase amount of ads to compensate for lower earnings per ad. The ad-supported free teir is probably going to be even worse dogshit than it already is, but the paid tier would be better than it is now because it wouldn't have ads. And neither would have privacy invading tracking, it's a win-win since they get to earn money on their product and we won't be tracked.
...Of course this under the assumption that their business is actually providing a service to their users and not just using it as a fly-trap for data-farming and profiling of their users. In case of the latter, yeah fuck 'em and let them earn no money if that's the case. i hope legislation removes that business model from existence.