Honestly, GIMP feels like it’s been getting rapidly more livable as a photo editor recently.

Like, I still wouldn’t call it suitable for professional use, but it’s been causing me noticeably less pain since they finally introduced some non-destructive editing.

I like to imagine there’s just another Musk that’s better known in the Trek universe…

I remember my 1st Surface Go’s microSD card reader being pretty good.

Funny, but I personally prefer in in the original Klingon:

Surely that’s got to be in the replicator database; I mean, I think it would be a big mess up on the part of the Obsidian Order if Seska didn’t at minimum have an opinion on jumja sticks, if not eat them frequently enough to get it programmed into the replicator.

I’m tired of multiverse plots, but I might make an exception if it allows them to bring Hemmer back without too severely messing up the overall plot of the show.

I think you’re mixing up Office 365 and Office Online.

Office 365 is a subscription for Microsoft Office that includes access to both the full, more powerful desktop Office applications and the much less powerful Office Online.

Though I don’t think it’s even called Office 365 anymore, but I don’t respect MS enough to bother to Google what they’re calling it now.

What model Thinkpad was it? Just curious.

Part of me wants to plug Thinkpad E16 as the cheapest new laptop you can get away with, but if the trackpad is the same one that drives you insane. Honestly, I don’t really care about the trackpad because I exclusively use Trackpoint.

Also, I would call the speakers mediocre, but honestly, I rarely listen to audio on my laptop, so they may be total crap.

FYI, 14” is sort of the new 13.3”. A lot of newer 14” laptops are the about size of an older 13.3” laptop, but just have less bezel.

Same situation as with 16” vs 15.6”.

Oh, whoops. I guess I made a mistake in the Inkscape export. Guess I’ll fix that eventually.

In Archer’s case, yes.

However, Paris stole directly from the dealership, apparently.

ffmpeg can use several different AV1 codecs, with varying levels of performance.

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.