If you want to support the creator, spread the word. Paying for things will generally just fill the purses of some rich ass media company execs who sit around all day masturbating on their third yacht.
By spreading the word, the creator is suddenly known for “having created this media that everyone knows”, landing them better deals with media corporations.
This concept applies to pretty much all media in all forms.
Most governments are greatly influenced by lobbyists, who are often tied to media companies. It gets worse since a lot of old people vote for heavy conservative parties, which in turn are even stronger leaning into lobbyism.
I bought myself into one through donations. Sounds kinda stupid, but those 20 bucks are worth the 5 years of high availability, secure and insane fast torrenting that followed (and are still going on).
Something something IP for those who wonder.
If you’re a power user, I’d actually recommend installing Arch Linux. It will take a while, and definitely much longer then just pressing “install” on a fancy UI, but the advantages it brings are priceless.
Generally, you’ll have to build the OS yourself, but you get a manual doing most of the job if you simply follow it, kinda like Lego. Given that you ultimately build it all yourself, you know how things work if anything might break. You also know how to adjust things if you wish to change something. And for everything you want to do, there’s an up-to-date manual in the arch wiki.
On top of that, the distro is running the newest software, which means that almost everything is compatible and runs in the best possible way. It will be tested 2-3 weeks in advance in order to ensure it won’t break your system immediately. But even if it does, guess what, there’s a manual on how to fix your system.
In case you’re overwhelmed at any point, there’s a great community. Not sure if they managed to move to lemmy, but they’re definitely over on reddit.
Good luck :)