Alright. Here’s my Daystrom Institute post on it.

Basically. I have to say, he was mostly a good uncle figure for the rest of the series. If I went beyond a casual analysis and started giving each character a number every episode, I might find counterexamples.

Also, I don’t count Resolutions as a spike since to me, that mostly felt natural, though it’s been a hot minute since I last watched it.

The first Paris spike is Year of Hell, or that time he dated Kes… oh crap, I need to go fix Harry real quick for dating Tom’s daughter.

Anyhow, the second Paris spike is that time he got romantically involved with a starship.

The Chakotay spike is mostly my bitterness about the pairing with Seven.

I in general just kind of found the entire Seven-Chakotay romance really weird.

In my opinion, Seven wasn’t necessarily emotionally mature enough for a romantic relationship. I don’t mean to call Seven a child, but because she’d been part of the Borg since she was a kid, it meant Seven never learned some important social abilities. It’s not necessarily my place to judge, but I feel like Seven was nudged towards romantic relationships at a point in her life when she wasn’t necessarily ready.

Of course, this is really complicated, bordering on a c/DaystromInstitute question. You know, rather than boring you with the details, I’ll actually just go create that post real quick, assuming a suitable one doesn’t exist.

Also, I’m a just a bit bitter the whole Chakotay-Janeway thing never worked out. I get there was professionalism stuff, but dating your astrometrics officer is probably weirder. I usually don’t particularly root for couples in shows, but there was legitimate chemistry between Janeway and Chakotay, especially in VOY:Resolutions.

Yeh, but I only bumped him to score 10/100, so I didn’t consider it that huge a bump since it’s biologically necessary.

Like, why the heck is Oracle still on this Earth? The only thing I can think of is MySQL, to which my response is, “Just use MariaDB.”

To be fair to Phoronix, I hardly think they’re the worst offender in Linux space; I find their Linux coverage to be the least terrible online. They cover new kernel and software developments pretty well.

Other Linux-focused sites seem to mostly consist of clickbait “Ditch Windows 11 headlines”, fleeting Linux apps, explaining something that there are already vast amounts of quality articles for, and/or thinly-veiled advertisements.

That is not to say Phoronix is perfect; I don’t necessarily enjoy having to run my ad blocker there. However, it’s not like it’s different on other sites. Comparatively, I find Phoronix to be a decent quality Linux outlet.

To be fair, it would be weird for Google NOT to support Linux, as I believe they use Debian Testing internally.

Personally, I find Debian pretty good these days. I used to default to Testing, but I’ve gravitated towards stable.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and Steam, almost any distro works.

That first part sounds like software/firmware stuff like mine, but the second part almost sounds like an antenna design issue.

Used to use Red Hat. This theme is for people who have nostalgia for back when Red Hat wasn’t a puppet of the blue monster - not the one that likes cookies.

Thunderbird’s not bad, but I usually use web stuff.

I have an existing iCloud e-mail that I haven’t had the time to switch off of. I then use G-Mail for school stuff - since I’ve signed away my soul to Google anyway, might as well use what they have to offer.

Maybe one day, I’ll start my own personal e-mail utopia, nut that day is not today.

Maybe Fedora?

Personally, though, I’m a Debian guy - Testing on my desktop and stable with Flatpaks and a few backports on my laptop.

Who would have thought? I’ve hardly touched Windows in over 2 years (mostly other people’s computers and the occasional app in my GPU-accelerated VM) so I haven’t kept up much.

“Blue barrels have no honor!”

According to the repair manual, my Wi-Fi card is actually replaceable, at least physically. I don’t know if Lenovo still does BIOS whitelists of cards like they used to (I think they did remove it a few years back.), but their OEM parts website has a diverse selection if this fix were ever to break.

I’d say other than the bottom being a bother to remove (and the keyboard not being designed to be replaced, though after some research, it seems possible), this is a surprisingly repairable laptop for how recent it it.

I totally agree with you on the Linux side. However, I first got into Linux by using it in Virtualbox on Windows. In the Windows world, as far as I know, it’s the easiest-to-use free-as-in-beer¹ hypervisor, so long as UEFI support has improved since I last used it.

1: I say this because of the non-libre extension pack.

As I have learned the hard way, it truly is.

I agree with Mint. I think Ubuntu has kind of devolved though, and PopOS is the better way to go. Fedora’s good too these days.

My recommendation is to try out a few distros in VirtualBox before switching - this was my process, and it can be very gradual.