data1701d

I mean, I think static is stable.

I feel like stability in some contexts means more than just the software not crashing often (although that is the big part); it means being able to expect the behavior to stay the same until you’re ready to upgrade to the next release and confront the new behavior all at once, sort of like upgrading Windows XP to Windows 7.

There’s certainly a place for rolling release - I use Debian Testing on my desktop - but I certainly appreciate being able to go a month without opening my laptop without getting a daunting notification like “There are 1578 updates available “ (on my Debian 12 Thinkpad, it’s usually only double digit, very minor updates).

Unrelated thing - just found out something funny.

Apparently, Torvalds himself uses a 580.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-RX-590-Torvalds

Someone else brought up Virt Manager here, which is my preferred; if you’ve ever used VirtualBox, you’ll probably be fine on Virt Manager. I like Virt Manager for using GTK3, as I’m in XFCE. I wouldn’t be surprised if both applications have similar settings, as they’re both LibVirt front ends, it seems.

Also, DistroBox, while a different sort of thing, is great for the sort of thing OP mentioned in that last paragraph. I usually just use command line, but there seems to be an unofficial GUI out there.

Now I feel like a really awesome thing would be something like Star Trek: Excelsior as an animated series that focuses on Captain Sulu after Generations.

I mean, Patrick Stewart did Picard in his 80s, and Takei’s only 3 years older than Stewart. However, Takei would probably be well into his 90s by the time this hypothetical series went into production; you’d also probably have to audition an understudy from the start in case Takei kicked the bucket.

I always just booted the old kernel when I ran into the issue, but it was less than ideal, which is why I would prefer to run a stable distro in this case.

Also, isn't ElementaryOS a stable distro anyway due to being Ubuntu-based?

I think this is why we need more animated Star Trek. While no recent animated Trek show has really managed to get past the equivalent total runtime to a ~5 season, 10 50-minute episode Trek series, I think animation could be a medium to get past some of the budgetary and labor limitations of a live action show in order to return to something closer to a TNG-style season. Not only that, but you could have the cast doing and interacting with things that would simply be impossible to do with any quality in a live-action show.

Although truth be told, I think half my opinion is just fueled by sourness over the end of Lower Decks and Prodigy. I really think though that animation could be the medium for a serious mainline Star Trek series that isn't (originally intended as) an excursion into a genre. Unfortunately, we sort of live in an animation dark age because of executive and general stupidity.

I enjoyed this episode much more than the previous one. It was quite fun. Sure, holodeck episodes aren't the most original idea in Star Trek, but they're almost always good, and I think this episode was worth the slight fudging of canon.

Also, seeing the "Last Frontier" bits and how well they captured the TOS feel makes me think, "Why do they need to make modern Trek so fancy? Why can't we have cheap-looking sets again?" Also, I think this is one of the better Paul Wesley performances in this show.

I was relieved to find they didn't go to far with the meta this episode. So many of the clips and dialogues of this episode I saw in the initial trailers made me worry this season was going to do a multiverse plot or venture a bit too far beyond the fourth wall.

The only thing is the Spock/La'an romance is driving me nuts. Neither is emotionally ready, and Spock STILL has a fiance. It's painful to watch it knowing that it's almost certainly doomed. I don't necessarily mind them acknowledging that they have feelings to each other, but I would have thought there would be a mutual desire to keep it platonic. In the end though, at least dancing isn't Vulcan neuropressure - as I get further into Enterprise, I kind of wonder how Rick Berman has evaded the trunk of my car for so long.

I've never run an installfest, but I've been to my university's Linux Users Group installfests, and here's what they did:

• Brought USBs with Fedora and OpenSUSE, which are their standard noob recommendations. Personally, I've used Debian for a long time, but I can get why Debian might not be something they want to recommend for noobs.
• Be there to help them
• If they're a bit squeemish about it, have them install in a VM software like VirtualBox on Windows or something like UTM on macOS.

Also, I'd recommend you bring extra USB peripherals in case the internal devices need a little bit of work; bring some extra mice, keyboards, and ethernet adapters. You hopefully won't need any of them, but they'll certainly make life easier if you do.

As for time, I'd imagine doing the basic install and ironing out some (not all) of the kinks probably takes less than it takes for a group to stat D & D characters, if that's a helpful comparison for you.

It's pre-T2, so it should be very easy to install a Linux distro on it. The only bit of misery you're going to encounter, as others have said, is the Broadcom drivers. Except for a select few distros, you'll probably need a USB Ethernet adapter for installing the operating system and adding the drivers.

Also, I'd rather put my hand in the circle saw than try running a rolling release on this laptop because the driver uses DKMS, meaning that kernel updates sometimes break it.

I only know this because the desktop I'm typing this on has a Broadcom Wi-Fi card from when I used to bare metal Hackintosh this machine. I've since moved to a nice house with an Ethernet port in every room; also, I just use macOS in a VM these days anyways.

As others have said, OCLP is a thing and a well-oiled machine from what I hear, but also, the oath I have made to the Church of Linuxology demands that I at least recommend Linux.

As said by @iii@mander.xyz, bog standard Debian Stable.

You really don’t want a rolling release distro for something like this - major software updates might change the behavior of your software, break your configs, etcetera. Stable distros do as much as they can to make sure that software behaves the same, only porting security fixes.

This way, you don’t really have to touch it except for updates with a nearly nonexistent chance of going wrong (and there’s stuff like unattended-upgrades so updates are automatic) and major upgrades.

You can go several years without a major upgrade just fine - Debian versions are supported for 5 years, and we’re only a few days from getting Trixie, which will last into 2030. New versions come out every two years, and it’s not that hard to upgrade between consecutive ones; I don’t think sitting down on a weekend every two years is that bad.

I kind of hate Ubuntu, but it’s pretty based in this case due to really long support. This might be a really great case for Rocky Linux though, as it also gets 10 years support.

Luckily, I can probably live with using mine a few more years. Mine's an early AM4 system with a Ryzen 5 2600 in it. My CPU performance isn't a huge bottleneck (although I'd like a couple more cores for faster compilation).

Really, it's my graphics card. The 580's fine for some basic gaming, but it sort of got left in the dust with ROCm support - it's kind-of-sort-of supported, but not well enough for Blender to work with it.

I think the situation's improved with ROCm on consumer GPUs enough now that so long as I buy a newer card, I should be fine. Debian support's improved a lot as well - for many GPUs, it should just be a matter of sudo apt install hipcc now. However, Debian is still a few versions behind in experimental and doesn't support the latest AMD cards, but I suspect that getting it packaged was the hard part, and that once Trixie releases, Forky/Testing will catch up in a few months.

I didn’t even know there were still cases bundled with power supplies! But yes, in general, throughout the history of PC building, I’m pretty sure included power supplies in any brand tend to be very low wattage. The power supply probably isn’t even broken - I’m just guessing the PC’s was upgraded to an RX 580, and the RX 580 was more power hungry than the original graphics card and the power supply just wasn’t designed for it.

Just a tip - next time you build or upgrade a PC, use this tool to estimate what power supply you need; https://www.newegg.com/tools/power-supply-calculator

You can get a 700 watt PSU that should work in the $50-70 range, although honestly, it might be worth it to go a bit bigger so you can cannibalize it for a future build when the time comes - even the RX 580, which is newer than your CPU, is getting a bit old and I hope to replace it if I build a new PC in 2028.