data1701d (He/Him)

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

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • As a completely new user who’s self-described as “not very tech savvy”, Arch is probably a terrible idea, and you should switch distros.

    I really like Debian, but something like Linux Mint or Fedora might be wiser for you; all three hold your hand more, which would be very important in your case. Fedora and Debian specifically are designed to work well with KDE, although Fedora will have newer versions.

    You certainly seem willing to learn (you got through the Arch install process), and I think you still have a great opportunity to enjoy Linux, but considering you’re calling the terminal emulator “Konsole”, your self-description is probably apt. FYI Konsole is just one application to access the terminal, kind of like how Firefox and Chrome are both web browsers, but you don’t use “Chrome” to refer to web browsers.









  • I second this. It’s basically just an extra TNG-era spinoff that fits really well after Voyager.

    The first season is a bit rough (though you’ve got to watch it at least once - important info for the rest of the show’s plot) but then the show starts doing its characters really well and has a sincerity to it you wouldn’t expect from its genre.

    When I first heard of the idea of an adult animated Star Trek comedy, I thought it was a terrible idea, but they executed it so darn well, and it’s my second favorite series behind DS9.


  • Watching Enterprise (currently on season 3), I’m not sure I can blame you, despite the plot getting interesting.

    Each 90s series has their fair share of “I want to put Rick Berman in my trunk and [redacted]” moments, but Enterprise takes it to a bit of a disgusting level.

    Like, with 7 in Voyager, you learn to tune out the unnecessary catsuit after a while and just enjoy an otherwise good character, but they take the sexualization of T’Pol’s character to such extremes that it interferes with her just being a person on the show.

    I’m watching ENT because I’m a sucker for canon, but I totally don’t blame you if you skip it.





  • Who the heck came up with “Fek’lhr”?! Like, it’s clearly it intended to be a Klingon word and not an Anglicization, but they failed miserably to actually follow the rules of the language.

    • “F” is not used for that sound in any major Klingon Romanization system (“f” corresponds to “ng” in xifan hol mapping); “v” is the closest thing.
    • “k” is also not used; that should be a “q”.
    • The apostrophe usually only comes after vowels, as it denotes a glottal stop.
    • “h” is not pronounced silently like it is here; it’s a weird consonant kind of like a soft g.

    It’s so bad it looks like Okrand had to fix it in one of his Klingon audio tapes - the official Klingon word is “veqlargh”, leaving the TNG onscreen versiob as a very weird Anglicization with a pointless apostrophe.




  • Yes and no. I think connotation is important here; “stable” means different things in different contexts even within computing, and they both denote different but important things - kind of like free of cost verses freedom.

    In the distro case, people need/want a distribution where they know a new version won’t come and break their config when they update at 2 AM and miss it in the changelog, and “stable” has been agreed upon as the term in that context. Of course, that can change, as all language does, but that’s just the current convention.

    Also, Debian tends to make sure software is not unusable before stable is shipped (the Nvidia thing is an anomaly I’ll explain below); while they sometimes fail, as you’ve hinted, I find it quite rare that it actually happens. Also, the “static” of Debian isn’t absolute; if something really has a breaking bug or a security vulnerability that affects overall system usability (basically something that can’t be fixed by installing a Flatpak), they will put out a fix, like with the Linux kernel or a web browser (via the security repo, included by default in all installs).

    Additionally, looking at this changelog, while the Nvidia situation is objectively a bit embarrassing, it looks like they were working on getting them updated, but just didn’t have much luck - I’m guessing a breaking change in the software that made it harder to package. Also, it’s in the non-free repo, which is on the back burner compared to the rest of the distro - something in the main repo will usually only be at most a few months behind at time of distro release.

    https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-graphics-drivers


  • 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).