Dice.
Dice.
I had a conversation with a friend about this exact kind of thing awhile back. We realized we had opposite expectations. She was under the assumption that people just kept stuff she told them secret unless specifically told that they could share it. I operate under the opposite assumption: that nothing is a secret unless the person sharing it specifically says not to share it (that applies to myself as well).
Regardless of which assumption one operates on currently, it’s much safer to operate under the latter one (I highly recommend it).
Family can be even more complicated, because in my experience even if you tell a family member to keep something a secret, that usually means, to most people, “keep it a secret from strangers” and you can bet that your other family members will find out about whatever it is you told that person.
I love Player.fm
They have both an android app with a lot of good features (stream or download, can set how many episodes to download at a time, when to delete old ones, all per podcast and as global defaults, set up your own categories/lists, display order, play order, etc) and an actual web site where you can log in and listen to your stuff as well with synced history, so you can pick up pretty much at the exact spot you paused a podcast on your phone (or vice versa).
KDE for sure. The modern versions look exactly like how I want a desktop environment to look out of the box, and they keep the full range of customizability that a desktop should, IMO, allow it’s users to have. Which is something Windows just kept slowly getting rid of over the years.
I also prefer to have a taskbar that is ever present with a traditional start menu that’s cleanly organized by category rather than the current full screen pop up “activities” search thing gnome does nowadays.