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.

Personality-wise, I feel like Grunkle Quark is more accurate.

Also, Bill is just a Q that got kicked out of the continuum.

Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.

Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.

Cute little Arex!

Now the question is, if they can do Edosian makeup, will we get Cadet/Ensign Arex cameo in SNW?

I think I actually prefer the Ritos; it takes what’s good about the TNG warp core and makes it feel a bit more spacious without turning the ship into a Tardis - looking at you, SNW Enterprise warp core and DISCO turbolifts!

EDIT: Tardis in the sense it’s bigger on the inside - I think wibbly wobbly timey wimey has always been a given in Starfleet.

Just to keep it a bit up to date (though for the record, Ceroptesian is probably my least favorite Debian theme in recent years).

Do note that the yt-dlp version in stable will go out of date; I recommend installing it from the backports repo so it keeps updating.

I also use XFCE. My desktop’s currently on Forky and went through all of Trixie, and the emdia keys have worked fine.

I’ll have to fiddle around and see what’s going on, though it may take a few days to get back because I’m starting school again soon, so I’m quite busy.

For reference, what programs do you tend to use with media keys? For instance, VLC, Firefox, etcetera.

What desktop environment are you using?

And maybe just give device model for good measure.

Reminds me of the time I made a tier list of all the canon alternate reality Janeway variants at the time… though that was made before I watched Prodigy S2, which added another alternate version of Hologram Janeway due to all the time shenanigans.

Well, except his parents, courtesy of Emperor Kodos.

Also, why do I kind of feel like we need to see Ensign Kevin Riley in SNW at least once? (For reference, Riley is a Lieutenant in TOS, which suggests he’s been in Starfleet a few years.)

You’re right in some ways; Windows is closer to a microkernel than Linux, though it doesn’t perfectly adhere to the philosophy of - there’s supposedly weird things like drawing calls in the Windows kernel that should be in microservice, I’ve heard

However, I wouldn’t necessarily call microkernels a detriment; in fact, Linux is a bit of an odd duck for going monolithic - modern Apple operating systems also run on a microkernel. Monolithic is an older architecture, and there are worries about the separation between components and system resilience e.g the webcam driver can’t crash the whole kernel.

In practice, it’s less of an issue, and there really aren’t any open source microkernel operating systems that are practical for production desktop and server use, which has a microkernel though there are certainly solutions for embedded systems.

QubesOS is built on Xen hypervisor, which uses a microkernel design, but Linux is then run in multiple VMs on top of it, which makes it more of a technicality in my eyes. RedoxOS also runs on a microkernel and is certainly intended as a desktop operating system, but its hardware support is limited; GNU Hurd is even more limited in that respect and not really usable.

Neat. I love Debian, but its documentation is crap! I hope this works out and I can see an improvement.

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 mean, that’s at least a grounded Anglicization that I could see someone in-universe coming up with. Pronunciation-wise, ”Fek’lhr” isn’t so bad either, but still incredibly stupid spelling-wise.

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.

Funny, though honestly, I’ve always just used the instance website. I haven’t seriously tried Voyager yet, and perhaps I should.

No.

I usually just use Bash; there’s a certain level of complexity where it begins to be more reasonable to just use Python.