data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • 106 Posts
  • 856 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • 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.



  • 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.















  • 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!