data1701d

1: Agree, mostly. I bought a Thinkpad E16 for its Linux support, though I accidentally got a Realtek one that had few bugs that I've since ironed out. My only thought is if you own existing hardware that is still usable, it is worth your time at least trying.

2: I somewhat agree. On my note taking laptop, I go by this philosophy. On my desktop, though, I theme away and still get lots done.

3: I sort of agree with you; I think like you said, if you have one drive for each OS, you won't have problems - dual booting is fine. I've got 2 internal drives in my Thinkpad, though honestly, I hardly use the Windows one. I remember 2 partitions being livable on my Surface Go, but again, I barely touched Windows, so I don't think it had much chance to bork the bootloader.

4: I agree on the Arch and Gentoo part - after trying to use Debian Testing on several laptops, I found rolling release just isn't conducive to a no-frills productivity device. Honestly, though, I don't see that much problem with immutable, especially if you go with Flatpak. I also think any stable distro you like should work so long as it has a backports kernel - I'm using Debian 12 that way on an E16 and it's been pretty smooth (besides the Realtek thing at the beginning, but I fixed that months ago).

5: Wholeheartedly disagree, mostly because XFCE was excluded. 😭 I feel like X11's still not that far off the beaten path. This feeling will probably change when XFCE switches; 4.20 comes out with preliminary support in a few weeks, and my bet is 4.22 in 2026 will have full Wayland support.

6: I don't totally agree with this either. I feel like when it works well natively, go for the native package. If you're having trouble, switch to the Flatpak. I've actually had problems with the VSCodium Flatpak on my laptop not using system environment by default, though there is a fix.

A weird VCR board game called Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Klingon Challenge. Honestly, I feel like I'd heard of it before, but I was reminded of it in the annotations for "A Farewell to Farms" recently, as it is the origin for the quote, "Experience bij!"

On a funnier note, the character is not Gowron, but is the same actor for some reason.

Here's a compilation of the camp in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjAvGNn20Y8

As well as a bit that compilation missed: https://youtu.be/3_739DxrMOs?t=3344

I wouldn't call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.

I didn't have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we'd gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a "dumb" TV.

Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I'm almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.

I felt that too and cried a little when he wasn’t in the IMDB

Yeh. I think part of it is it's just hard to match season 4. I think the series' single funniest dialogue comes from "Trusted Sources".

Ransom: "How much do bench?"

Magistrate: "We don't do it for the numbers. We do it to quiet the voices in our heads!"

Ransom: "Cool. I bench 25."

(Starts Daystrom Institute post on how US OSHA became UE OSHA became UFP OSHA)

Also, half-dead macrovirus infected with a worm put in charge of Starfleet Medical.

I’ve never used MATE - almost always been an XFCE guy since I got serious about Linux.

It was sort of an accident. After a while of using Ubuntu in a VM (including a weird IceWM stint), I tried installing Debian on an old laptop I had sitting around. The first attempt, where I tried KDE, something went wrong with the Network Manager install. At this point, I can never know what went wrong - it’s been years All I know is that I chose XFCE on the second attempt and didn’t have the problems, likely due to coincidence. Still, I stick with XFCE out of satisfaction.

I mean YaST is kind of snazzy, though not enough to pull me from Debian for the moment.

Phasers or Bat’leths (Mek’leths are fine as well)?

We could also do a round of Chula, a solar sail race, ambo-jitsu, springball, darts, etcetera.

Burnham falls afoul of the “no promoted mains” rule, unfortunately.

I find it kind of sad they haven't done anything in the 2290s-2350s era. I think it would be fun to have a series with April in monster maroon coming up on his second retirement in the late 2310s or early 2320s.

The IDW miniseries Picard's Academy was set in this era (aligning with previous canon of when Picard went to the Academy). I enjoyed it (checked it out from my local library), though probably half just because of Spock's outfit, honestly.

EDIT: April probably wouldn't be the primary focus. It would probably focus on a diplomatic ship or maybe even the Academy or civilians. It probably couldn't be too action-based, as we don't want to undermine this being one of the most peaceful eras in Federation history - I worry to do anything interesting, you'd have to pull Disco-style shenanigans again. No matter one's opinion on Disco, I feel like it would be kind of obnoxious to do another "this secretly happened and no one knows about it" series.

This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background: