Most aliens have forehead ridges; some, like Tandarand, have giant cheeks. But the humans, they have… pronounced philtrums!

I was actually going through the audiobook of this trying to gather and classify enough data to fine tune a Piper TTS voice of the Star Trek computer.

Haven’t finished it yet, but maybe one day. While I normally would have ethical qualms about commanding the likenesses of the dead, they actually did try to collect voice data before Majel Barrett died; unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to actually pull it off, but the attempt feels as close to consent for this sort of thing as one can get.

I don’t know. There’s something about the description of the ENT novels that rubs me the wrong way.

Painfully true, unfortunately.

This is more a comic/graphic novel than a proper Trek novel, but I think Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way is possibly the best Star Trek comic I’ve ever read.

It stays true to the source material, and unlike a lot of IDW stuff I’ve read, doesn’t completely shark jump from the source material in an attempt to be mysterious, cool, or interesting just for the heck of it.

Probably the only other piece of IDW Trek I enjoyed this much was the TNG Mirror Universe, which did really well to achieve a “keep me on the edge of my seat” feeling.

I still need to read some other Trek comics, though, especially the TNG/Doctor Who crossover, which a local library branch of mine has. I also have a ton of PDFs from the recent Humble Bundle to burn through.

AMD GPUs are officially supported in the Linux kernel and Mesa. They pretty much just work out of the box with minimal setup on a fresh distro install.

NVidia GPUs often require out-of-tree proprietary drivers to work with full performance; these drivers are often a pain to install and update. Supposedly, things are getting less terrible now, but NVidia is still overall more likely to cause you pain than AMD.

Intel Arc dGPUs, like AMD, have decent native kernel and Mesa support from what I can tell, but tend to have worse performance than AMD. However, I hear they’re ridiculously good for video encoding!

What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.

I wasn’t intending to convey this timeline could be a dream; I was moreso saying I thought my mind had made up this Microcenter to distract me from this dreadful reality.

I could have worded my initial post better.

Personality-wise, I feel like Grunkle Quark is more accurate.

Also, Bill is just a Q that got kicked out of the continuum.

All I was thinking about watching this video is “I wish they’d open a MicroCenter in Phoenix”; I’d had a blast visiting the Tustin location after seeing TMBG in LA this May.

I then googled it for fun and found out they announced they’re opening one a month ago! I checked national news to see if I was in some jolly alternate timeline (unfortunately, no) or dreaming, and it appears not.

Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.

Just curious: which AV1 encoder were you using?

I ask because librav1e and libaom performance is dismal, but libsvtav1 can at least do ~1.00x speed, which is impressive considering how complex the codec is.

That’s not to say I don’t welcome improvements, though I think AV1 Vulkan requires hardware support I don’t have on my RX 580; it wasn’t until the RX 7000 series that AMD cards started getting hardware encoded support for AV1.

Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.

Cute little Arex!

Now the question is, if they can do Edosian makeup, will we get Cadet/Ensign Arex cameo in SNW?

In canon, it was described as an implementation of “variable warp geometry”.

Honestly, I get wanting to keep using those laptops and that a perk of Linux is extending a device’s usable lifespan, but the last i386 machines are probably ~20 years old at this point; I think an upgrade is justified.

You can score an old AMD64 machine for next to nothing these days - you might even find something throwing one out; I think the sweet spot is a 1st or 2nd generation Intel Core i Series machine.

I think I actually prefer the Ritos; it takes what’s good about the TNG warp core and makes it feel a bit more spacious without turning the ship into a Tardis - looking at you, SNW Enterprise warp core and DISCO turbolifts!

EDIT: Tardis in the sense it’s bigger on the insidr - I think wibbly wobbly timey wimey has always been a given in Starfleet.

Just to keep it a bit up to date (though for the record, Ceroptesian is probably my least favorite Debian theme in recent years).

Are we counting S1 “The Elysian Kingdom”? I know it’s not technically a holodeck episode, but…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrxKX44qBJ0