data1701d (He/Him) @ data1701d @startrek.website

"Life forms.

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Lossless webp actually has slightly better compression than PNG.

Most browsers support it, but most web apps, including some Google Suite stuff ironically, don’t support uploading a webp.

"Oh no! It's another Enterprise!"

All aboard the obscure Beta canon Weyoun variant train:

May I ask what your config was, such as distro, packaging format, and extensions were used? Also, what hardware?

Additionally, what issues specifically were you experiencing specifically? Were sites just loading slowly?

I ask because I’ve used recent versions Firefox on decently old hardware with 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores and had almost no problems. Everything rendered correctly and in a reasonable amount of time. I’d be curious to know why that isn’t happening for you.

Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.

Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.

As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.

If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.

If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.

Huh. I guess 3 years of Debian usage has just gotten me used to stuff like that.

I can see where one might go wrong; there’s a lot of sections in that guide with contingencies only meant for specific situations, like upgrading from a USB or optical disc.

May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).

Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.

• Blink is resource intensive and has so many non-standard APIs for the sake of Google’s version of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
• WebKit takes 50 years to support the newest standards.
• Gecko (Firefox) is non-modular and is limited to being used in Firefox, Thunderbird, and forks and Firefox as a result. Its performance is also somewhat worse than Chrome’s, but not noticeable for daily use.

Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.

Honestly, even those don’t run that horrid for me when I have to use them.

Did you restart the computer after the upgrade and before reinstalling third party repo packages?

The “half the programs not working” kind of sounds like you had packages compiled for a newer libc and the like but the newer libc wasn’t in memory yet because you hadn’t restarted.

May I ask how your Debian upgrades go wrong?

I mostly say so because I recently upgraded from 12 to 13 with almost no issues; the only issue was something with Apache that ended up being a quick fix. I followed the official Debian guide and temporarily remove third party repos and packages.

True.

External drives? Usually on most distros and file managers, it’s just one click.

I have had a bit of a horrid time with Bluetooth, though, especially when it comes to audio. However, I will say Linux allows you to do some nuts things with Bluetooth like emulate a Nintendo Switch controller with NXBT, allowing you to use a PlayStation controller on a Switch with a spare laptop.

As for audio, I feel like life has gotten much better for the layman since Pipewire.

I don’t think VR setups are that common, and the Venn diagram of VR owners and Linux users has to be even smaller. I’ve probably only known 2 people who actually own a headset, and both of them were standalone Oculus affairs.

Overall, I feel like it’s possible to conceptually understand Linux and which config file is while, while Windows registry is an incomprehensible beast. Also, it feels like Linux tends to have better errors that correlate to a specific problem, whereas the same Windows error could be caused by many different things and lead you on a wild goose chase through forum posts filled with generic advice and dead ends.

This should just be working if it’s standard USB audio; I’d recommend just researching issues with USB headphones in general. Maybe also try another cable.

If nothing works, it looks like you can use a double 3.5mm cable on this model, which pretty much every large retailer with an electronics section should have.

If you don’t like bog standard Debian, you might really like Debian Testing.

It allows you to get decently new packages; I’d say typical lag is one week to a couple months depending on the popularity and/or complexity of the project.

I’ve been using it on my desktop for over three years just fine. It’s been quite stable while still getting new software versions in a mostly timely fashion.

Do note though that Testing means Testing; it’s not really concerned with being a rolling release distro, but with preparing for the next release, so there’s a few quirks:

• Sometimes, a package you’re using gets removed while its dependencies undergo a transition, forcing you to use the Flatpak.
• When a new stable release starts to get close (usually 6 months), they’ll start what’s called freezes, where they let in progressively less changes until release, after which things start speeding up again.
• As a general annoyance of anything rolling release-esque, software behavior may change over time, meaning a previously good config can suddenly break, and you have to fix it.

Personally, I’ve grown tired of Debian Testing and rolling release in general; while I still using Testing on my desktop, I’ve thrown Debian Stable on most things I’ve owned since then, and if I really need a newer version of software, I’ll just install the Flatpak or use a container.

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.

Honestly, it took me a second to even realize this wasn’t just an unedited scene from LD.

That was a fun listen. We’ll see where this goes.

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.