May I ask how your Debian upgrades go wrong?

I mostly say so because I recently upgraded from 12 to 13 with almost no issues; the only issue was something with Apache that ended up being a quick fix. I followed the official Debian guide and temporarily remove third party repos and packages.

True.

External drives? Usually on most distros and file managers, it’s just one click.

I have had a bit of a horrid time with Bluetooth, though, especially when it comes to audio. However, I will say Linux allows you to do some nuts things with Bluetooth like emulate a Nintendo Switch controller with NXBT, allowing you to use a PlayStation controller on a Switch with a spare laptop.

As for audio, I feel like life has gotten much better for the layman since Pipewire.

I don’t think VR setups are that common, and the Venn diagram of VR owners and Linux users has to be even smaller. I’ve probably only known 2 people who actually own a headset, and both of them were standalone Oculus affairs.

Overall, I feel like it’s possible to conceptually understand Linux and which config file is while, while Windows registry is an incomprehensible beast. Also, it feels like Linux tends to have better errors that correlate to a specific problem, whereas the same Windows error could be caused by many different things and lead you on a wild goose chase through forum posts filled with generic advice and dead ends.

This should just be working if it’s standard USB audio; I’d recommend just researching issues with USB headphones in general. Maybe also try another cable.

If nothing works, it looks like you can use a double 3.5mm cable on this model, which pretty much every large retailer with an electronics section should have.

If you don’t like bog standard Debian, you might really like Debian Testing.

It allows you to get decently new packages; I’d say typical lag is one week to a couple months depending on the popularity and/or complexity of the project.

I’ve been using it on my desktop for over three years just fine. It’s been quite stable while still getting new software versions in a mostly timely fashion.

Do note though that Testing means Testing; it’s not really concerned with being a rolling release distro, but with preparing for the next release, so there’s a few quirks:

• Sometimes, a package you’re using gets removed while its dependencies undergo a transition, forcing you to use the Flatpak.
• When a new stable release starts to get close (usually 6 months), they’ll start what’s called freezes, where they let in progressively less changes until release, after which things start speeding up again.
• As a general annoyance of anything rolling release-esque, software behavior may change over time, meaning a previously good config can suddenly break, and you have to fix it.

Personally, I’ve grown tired of Debian Testing and rolling release in general; while I still using Testing on my desktop, I’ve thrown Debian Stable on most things I’ve owned since then, and if I really need a newer version of software, I’ll just install the Flatpak or use a container.

Debian Stable. Get it installed, get everything working right and configured the way this person likes it on a reasonable DE with default themes, and more likely than not, you won’t have to touch this thing for years.

The setup’s not necessarily for noobs, but if you’re the one doing the setup, you should be able to get it into a place where it will pretty much never break for them.

You should probably give them KDE or GNOME (probably KDE, as it’s more Windows-like and less my way or the highway than Gnome). As much as I love XFCE, it’s probably a good idea to give a layman a feature-heavy DE so that nothing is likely to be missing; also, it’s way too easy to accidentally delete panel items or entire panels on accident and a little annoying to restore things back to the way they were. KDE’s panels implementation mitigates these issues.

Honestly, it took me a second to even realize this wasn’t just an unedited scene from LD.

That was a fun listen. We’ll see where this goes.

I think it’s less “I’m not the target audience” and more if you’re going to do a Star Trek [insert genre/target audience] show, do it right.

It’s certainly possible to create an intelligent pre-school show that isn’t painful for adults to watch. Take Bluey, for instance. Toddlers love that show, but it also has a cult following among the adults that watch it with their kids, and the style doesn’t look like every single other kids television series on the air.

In comparison, Scouts has a cheap-looking generic style I’ve seen before, and the plots we’ve seem are absolutely brain-dead and superficial. Sure, maybe we don’t need the kids to talk at length about the subspace plasma inverter matrix manifolds or whatever, but that doesn’t mean the show can’t be more than just bright colors and barely coherent plots. It just doesn’t do any justice whatsoever to what Star Trek is.

My sister called this an abomination… and she’s the one who sees redeeming qualities in DISCO (I do too, but I think she likes Disco more than me).

From what I’ve read, I agree. This seems to be purely oriented towards iPad babies, which is horrid; these kinds of shows let their child viewers be dumber than they actually are.

I’d much rather have a Craig of the Creek-esque show about a group of kids having fun and going about their lives on a starbase while their parents deal with big Starfleet stuff in the background, hinting at something bigger going on as a mystery for parents and smart kids to solve. The kids never save the entire Federation or something hokey like that; at most, we have something like a Picard stuck in the turbolift with three children and a broken leg during red alert situation every once in a while.

No, seriously. These are the kinds of episodes that really make you want to have Rick Berman “as a guest” in the trunk of your car before “taking him for a nice swim” in the river.

I think it gets good when he goes from unintentionally annoying to well-meaningly annoying.

I don’t know; I’d rather watch all of Discovery than some of the horniest Enterprise episodes…

Except Metro Center got torn down.

Persistence should be near impossible; you most likely have a bad habit or other factor that makes you vulnerable. As others have said, check your router settings; make sure your router firmware is the latest to patch any vulnerabilities. Check devices on your network to make sure none are compromised.

My first guess, like others, is you’re doing something horribly wrong with your port forwarding, followed by you’re installing suspect software. Don’t go installing from random Github/Gitlab repositories without at least doing a bit of background research. Also, sometimes even legitimate open source projects get compromised. Ultimately, try to stick to the bare minimum, just stuff from the Debian repos, and see if it still happens.

If you still have the problem, then my last resort is to ask this (and this is really paranoid, hopefully an unlikely scenario for you): do you use your computer in a safe environment where only people you trust can access it?

I mostly ask because if not, maybe someone has physical access to your computer and is pulling an evil maid attack, installing the software when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s a jerk coworker. Maybe it’s a creepy landlord. A login password is not enough to defend against this; it may be possible for the attacker to boot off a USB stick and modify system files. The only way to prevent this is to reinstall and use full disk encryption, which I do on my laptop. You can try to use Secure Boot and TPM¹ to add further protection, but honestly, your attacker just sounds like some script kiddie and probably won’t perform a complex attack on your boot partiton.

1: Despite their obnoxious utilization by Microsoft, they can actually be quite useful to a Linux user, making it possible to set up auto-decryption on boot that doesn’t work if the boot partition has been tampered with (in which case you use a backup password).

One of deez days, one of deez days, chicken and ice cream

I press X, and they make up some BS about how your unorthodox solution changes the warp geometry in just the right way. Picard gives you some sort of rant about being more careful in the future, a neutral relationship impact. Meanwhile, Chief tactical Lieutenant Murder-Anything-That-Isn’t Human is so impressed their bio now says they want to marry you, though you know that will quickly change to shove you out an airlock unless you are a total psychopath.

I think I largely agree with your points.

I’m also really annoyed that the choice tree required a website that no longer works. Additionally, for the overall results of the graphics, I’m rather bugged the game is that hardware intensive and think they could have easily optimized to make this game more accessible to lower-end hardware. I did my entire playthrough on an AMD laptop with iGPU (on Linux through Proton), and it was mostly playable.

However, it was still really fun, and I only payed $12.50 for it.

Honestly, ENT looks pretty good. I mean, not as good as TOS remaster, but being done natively in 720p (and even 1080 in later seasons), it doesn’t look that bad.

Honestly, GIMP feels like it’s been getting rapidly more livable as a photo editor recently.

Like, I still wouldn’t call it suitable for professional use, but it’s been causing me noticeably less pain since they finally introduced some non-destructive editing.