f00f/eris

“I can’t stop the heterocyclic declination!” (TNG: “Samaritan Snare”)

“Move Along Home” would work so much better as a Doctor Who episode. Has a kind of absurdity that is perfect for Who, but stands out in a bad way in Trek.

I don’t have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

I’ve never used these, but I’ve come across them while scrolling through F-Droid and they seem to fit this use case:

Kotatsu
Kinoko

I’ll probably use Codeberg or another Forgejo server for my next programming project, if/when I have one that is far enough along to publish (motivating myself to get that far is a tall task). Until then, everything I’d consider contributing to is either on GitHub, or is self-hosting some other software, so I don’t have a reason to create an account yet.

Saru and Kelvin Spock would probably get along really well. Everyone else would be having heated arguments that I think would be amazing to witness, if not take part in.

I think I’d most like to sit between Mariner and Pike, though.

If you haven’t set up this laptop yet, then I’d suggest installing a server-oriented distro like Debian, AlmaLinux, or Ubuntu Server. Those have minimal install options that come without a desktop environment installed, as most servers do not need one. If you’d like to make the install harder for yourself, this might be a good excuse to give Arch Linux or Gentoo a try, as those have the option of a fully manual install. If you’d like, you can install a desktop environment afterwards using the package manager.

If you already have a Linux with a graphical desktop installed, you can configure the system not to automatically start it with sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target. (Do not do this on your main device!) You can re-enable it with sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target.

Regardless, you can then start a graphical session using startx, or whatever command is more appropriate for your desktop environment (gnome-session to start GNOME on Wayland, startplasma-wayland to start KDE Plasma), or by sudo systemctl starting your login screen manager (sddm, gdm, lightdm, etc).

I’m currently on the RHCSA path myself, and I can tell you that the courses are not worth the thousands that Red Hat charges. There are plenty of unofficial video courses on YouTube and Udemy and study guides and practice tests on GitHub that are free or cheap, and other resources for every individual study topic, which will be good enough.

However, though I can’t speak from experience, it seems like the cert itself will look good enough on a resume to justify the investment of $500 and a month of studying.

Assuming you mean the Beelink S12 (which is the first thing that comes up in a search for “n100 mini pc”), that’s quite similar to my own computer specs, which can run just about any distro, with enough resources to spare for a VM or two. I don’t think it’s necessary to go really lightweight or pick something special. If there’s a distro you’re already familiar with and know you can do all of those things on, install that.

If you like Garuda, you could always try a different Arch spin which is lighter out of the box, like CachyOS or EndeavourOS.

Windows 8.1 was my last version before I made the switch. Windows 8 was horrible. The Metro UI broke all my habits from Windows XP from 7 while also making it harder to tweak my system. By the time 8.1 came out, I’d found enough ways around the main annoyances that its improvements were moot, but many issues remained, such as the bloatware bundled with my PC, and frequent slowness and instability.

As for why I switched, I was attracted by the free software ideal, and trying to get away from Windows, and I had watched and read several things that further convinced me it was superior, but I think the ultimate reason was that I had become hyperfixated on Linux. Thankfully, in this case, autism did not steer me wrong. My level of obsession with Linux has declined, but I still enjoy using my computer much more than I ever did or would on Windows.

Unlikely. While in theory someone could create a compatibility layer, it would be quite a challenge, as obviously, kernel modules are very closely tied to the specific kernel. I did some web searches, and only found the same few dead projects (that didn’t completely solve this issue anyway) that you found, and other forum posts that offer little encouragement.

Make sure you have the latest version of Windows 10 or 11, and the latest drivers for your network hardware. If you do, then there’s probably not much you can do about this.

Actually, I wonder if this show was greenlit in some way because of Prodigy’s cancellation. They’re trying to draw in a younger audience for the sake of the franchise’s long term prospects, but Prodigy didn’t get as many views on Paramount+ as they hoped (and is now on a different service), so they wanted to make a version of that which is better suited to streaming, without the awkward concessions to Nickelodeon’s release schedule.

Though, I think the problem is really Paramount+. A streaming service that is best known for Star Trek and a bunch of dramas that old people watch, is unlikely to get anyone under 30 to subscribe to it for Star Trek.

Bit confused about what you’re looking for. If you’re just SSH/VNC ing into devices on the same local network, then you can simply use their local IP address, which you can find with a command like ip addr and will rarely change, or their hostname if your network is configured properly. There are several GUIs that can remember connection info for you, so you likely will only need it once. It’s also quite easy to scan the local network for SSH servers if you have nmap (nmap -p22 <your ip address range, e.g. 192.168.0.1/24>). If you need to connect to a device on your home network from a different network, any VPN software can achieve that. I’m not aware of any remote desktop solution that doesn’t require a network connection, but your network doesn’t necessarily need to be connected to the Internet.

Are you looking for a GUI that combines all those things?

I’m against a megathread. That would be too busy and I think there will be more than enough to discuss about each episode.

For entirely selfish reasons, I’d like individual discussion threads for each episode that come out one or two a day, since that’s the pace I expect to be watching it (optimistically).

Though, I think the best option for everyone might be five-episode blocks. That would allow both bingewatchers and slower viewers to enjoy the conversation without spamming the feed, and will match up well enough with the “parts” it would have been split into if it aired on Nickelodeon that both broad and individual episode discussions will make sense.

Yeah, 50% (ram / 2) seems about right.

The major tradeoff with zRAM is that programs are much more likely to crash due to running out of memory, but will run faster when memory is running low and freezes are less likely. You can think of it as offloading the pressure that traditional swap puts onto your disk, onto the (much faster) CPU. There will be an impact on CPU usage, but not enough to cause noticeable slowdown; in my experience running Linux, the CPU is almost never the reason something is slow, and is only going to be under significant pressure if you’re running a 3D game in software rendering, compiling a large program, or another complex CPU-bound task.

I wouldn’t recommend making the switch unless you often encounter system freezes or slowness while running tasks that use a lot of RAM (like web browsing on certain sites, or gaming), but it will improve things in that case.

It’s not systemd’s fault, though systemd most often implements offline updates. The arguments for and against offline updates have nothing to do with systemd.

A lot of Linux distros, and graphical package managers like Discover and GNOME Software, are moving in that direction, under the argument that updating while online can cause disruptions to running software, in the worst case including the package manager itself (which can brick the system if it occurs in the middle of a critical update), and updates can’t be applied until the affected program (or the system, in case of critical components like the kernel) restarts anyway. Fedora Magazine explains the reasoning here: https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

In my personal experience though, I have never had an issue enabling automatic online updates on Debian Stable, and have had computers stay online for several months without any noticeable issues beyond Firefox restarting, so the risk is there but it’s pretty minor.

I personally don’t use Arch, but I think the reason so many people find it stable in practice is because they know their system well. When something breaks or needs to be changed, they know which configuration file to edit, which package to {un,re,}install, what to look for in the AUR, etc., and they can usually avoid those things in the first place, because they went through a fairly hands-on install process, not to mention having the best Linux wiki in existence at their disposal.

On top of that, I think a lot of derivatives of Debian, including Ubuntu and all its derivatives, severely undermine their stability by providing custom configurations for or changes to software that are rarely documented and completely transparent to the user… until they break and leave no indication of how to fix them. Which is one reason why I ended up using base Debian.

I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a mix between Starfleet and Vau N’Akat dress.

Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won’t be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function