True and I guess hadn't considered everyone's usages at the time I posted this thread. Really started here, kinda.

The only thing I dislike about CD\DVD\Blu is scratches and dust: dusting helps, some scratches can be repaired and Blu-ray is scratch resistant so now for my favorite backups I make more backups. Love: flipping through movie main menus in VLC, finding music to buy while listening at the library or a friends house,,, and for me the lists never end... I have some large Flash, SD and hard drives for backups and assume as time goes on I will switch to keeping optical drives in storage, just in case like my 5 and 1/4 floppies\drives...

I haven't had a laptop with a removable media drive in over a decade, salesdroid even tried to talk me into a different model because the (small light) one I wanted didn't have any drives to load my software. I used the drive once every couple years when I would put in a bigger drive and install the most current distro.
I do have one external USB bluray burner to read/write if/when necessary from any of the 10machines in the house.

I could easily live without a cd/dvd/bluray drive. Since the advent of flash drives and cloud storage, what do I need optical drives for? The last thing I really needed an optical drive for was my car and I have since upgraded my stereo so it can play music off my phone via bluetooth, usb or AUXIN.
Even among 'average' users, they rarely use optical discs in my experience

My systems still HAVE optical drives, but honestly never use them. I use the blu-ray drive on my desktop once in a great while to watch movies, other than that, I can't remember the last time I used an optical drive on one of my own machines other than reinstalling Windows.

I have no use at all for an optical drive, and I have no devices with one. Why would I buy software on a DVD? I can download it for free directly from the repositories, and I get music the same way. I haven't bought a music CD in a decade or more. It's all available for download. I have a lot of CDs, as well as tapes and LPs sitting and gathering dust, and maybe one day I'll transfer some of them to digital formats, but there is no hurry, because it's all available digitally already, or at least most of it. Optical drives are obsolete, just as floppy drives are. They're still around, but fewer and fewer people use them, or care about them. I tossed my floppy discs some time back, because they're useless. I'll eventually toss my optical discs, too. Not yet, but eventually.

Until I can buy music as FLAC or WAV and rent and buy movies online (reliably, I'm not paying for Netflix to find an update breaks the already cobbled-together mess needed to install it on Linux) I'll need an optical drive but, as mentioned, I just use a USB one. I don't buy that much music or many movies though so my drive rarely gets used.
I just ordered a 3TB hard drive to replace 3 in a RAID and once I've sorted things that will be my only internal mechanical drive (I've a USB3 one for backup so I don't have to re-rip things if the internal one dies).
Optical drives are horrible, noisy unreliable and tiny in capacity. I really wish I didn't have to use them at all.

Like was said all have different uses and collections. I have always used computers to do ANYTHING they can and love media as-well so hoards of backups (preferably that last forever) from probably close to 50 different Linuces (by now,) RiverCad, Antonio Vivaldi, The IT Crowd and on and on*...
Blu-ray on a single side 25GB disk at (give\take) $1.70 so I will switch when they make me! Drive was less than $100 almost two years ago.

• Billionaires as proprietors love reselling software (new or old) when transactions are supposedly lost in the cloud and\or hardware is "out dated!?."

I did say, mixed with rant!

I like .ogg and my dives are quiet.

I hate to break it to you but optical media backups won't necessarily last at all. They may not even burn properly and unless you verify them you'll never know. The same can be said of USB backups too I don't deny but optical backups are certainly not reliable.
I've not come across an optical drive that's quiet -- they've always been the noisiest thing in the computers I've seen -- well, second to some blocked fans etc. but in an otherwise OK system they're the loudest.
I rip all my CDs to FLAC after I buy them then put them in a flight case and often don't see them for months. I can play those FLAC files on my desktop on my netbook, stream them or put them on my portable media player.
As for the price of optical media -- I can buy two 32GB USB sticks for around $50 and have easily testable redundant backups to carry in my pocket or give to friends or family members. I do see why BluRay could be better though in having multiple snapshots so I'm certainly not saying they don't have their uses just that being cheap doesn't make them more useful.

I have backup CD and DVD disks from 10 years ago that read fine with no errors. I consider them the most reliable backup media, and they will likely remain so for decades onward. I don't need them to last 10 years, I mean I just threw them away because they were Windoze XP related backups ... useless to me now.

Then you're lucky, assuming you mean you've restored all the files on them and not just opened them and said "yeah, that looks OK". I'm not saying that optical media will always be corrupt but it's certainly not a given that it will burn correctly or last longer than a year or two.

All the files were intact and no read errors on any files. It does depend of the quality of the media and the burner, but in general I haven't had any problems with good media and good burners. The only disks that were bad were that way because the burner was dieing. There were also some disks that were badly manufactured and failed to burn properly.

All of the disks were kept in good conditions, away from light, in a case, and in relatively dry conditions.

Proprietary plus third party burning software normally won't let you tweak the disks format like in Linux. Back when I used winbow$ I had to work more at reading old, old data but now it's even easier and most old software intended for microcoughed works well in Wine or Virtualbox and such.

Lucky?

I should stop bad-mouthing optical media really as I don't have a problem with people using them -- it's just that personally I found them more trouble than they were worth and migrated away as I am trying to do with mechanical media altogether in the long run.

I always picture myself off the grid but then with solar, wind and battery power.