Haven't purchased it yet. I need to read it, but I've had a difficult time tracking down issue 30 in comic book stores - I got behind and have everything else in the other spin off series.

Frankly, I lack an understanding of the disdain for "All I Want For Christmas Is You" - I have heard much more annoying Christmas songs. It may be a bit cloying and heavily pop, but I think it's well executed, at least compared to almost any Christmas song put out by a major artist in the 21st century. Also, I think My Chemical Romance pulled off a rather good cover that perhaps beats the original.

Maybe part of it is I have a 5 hour personal/family Christmas playlist that reduces the amount of repeated listens to a more manageable degree. In addition to more well-known ones and several covers, it is also filled to the brim with alternative and indie Christmas music - Jonathan Coulton especially is good at making atypical holiday songs that don't get annoying.

While the VOY crew themselves still wear what you mentioned, we do see their Alpha quadrant counterparts are wearing First Contact Uniforms.

I'll revise to make it clearer who I'm talking about.

Part of me is like, “Seriously! Mire multiverse stuff! Can we take a break, please?”, while the other half of me is like, “If it’s as good as LD or PRO multiverse stuff, I’ll take it!”

I am a bit worried about the fourth wall breaking stuff, but I wonder if they’re doing a Benny Russell “dreamer and the dream”-type thing, which might be fun.

The Clue episode looks fun. The trailer makes it look like this season is 75% quasi-holodeck episodes, which would be quite funny but is probably not the cases.

Bem better come apart, or this one will make sure someone else does.

I’m on a TNG rewatch right now, but I’ll probably be right back to LD before very long.

You’ve got quite a bit - it’s in TNG S4, so you’ve still got all of TAS (if you choose. If you’re thinking about skipping, at least watch Yesteryear), the first few movies, and the first three seasons and six episodes of TNG to go before you hit this glorious staple who will last through DS9.

I think your Adobe comment isn't quite right. I have two family members who are professional photographers and use Photoshop; Photoshop is so important to their workflow they can't give it up just to use Linux. They thus stick with Windows (though one's work had them using Macs for a bit, so they see it as acceptable).

In contrast, although I sometimes used Photoshop in hobbies (a euphemism for memes), I never used any features so specific to Photoshop that I couldn't just replace it with a combination of Inkscape and GIMP.

I think the truth is as much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is the best at what it does right now compared to competitors; GIMP 3.0 has a dismal UI and a weaker feature set, and the latter is largely true of a lot of the web-based editors as well.

I love this site.

The KMS timeouts almost make me wonder if the graphics chip is snorting some sort of crack.

Just to be safe, maybe try booting a live USB and see what happens. To be very sure, you could even try multiple distro/DE combos on the live disk.

If it's RAM, it should be easily replaceable on a laptop of that age. If it's the graphics chip, then it's probably time to find some other laptop. You can probably still press this to service in a homelab, though.

That just sounds like classic Winsanity right there, not a hard drive issue.

Like others have said, most of this is possible but might take a bit of work to set up. In other words, you’re doing somewhat complex things on Windows, so it’s going to get a bit complex on Linux.

I’ve done GPU passthrough using 2 graphics cards (RX 580 going to VM and RX 550 staying connected to host) for VMs on my desktop, and it mostly works. I’d recommend this tutorial for getting it set up. I had to adapt it a bit to get my AMD card working, but it got me started. I now pass through my RX 580 to 3 VMs (obviously not at the same time): Windows 10, Windows 7, and a Hackintosh VM. Although you can technically use just 1 card (leaving Linux without graphics as Windows is using the card), I recommend using dual cards. Just make sure you:

1. Have a free PCIe slot for a second graphics card that stays connected to a monitor while your better card goes to the VM. (The secondary card can be a cheap card - I’d say the 1030 might be good for you. There are ways to use the better GPU to get better performance in Linux native applications when a GPU passthrough VM isn’t running.)
2. Be sure that slot is in a different IOMMU group from the GPU you pass through to the VM as well as any important system peripherals like network cards or SSDs. (Just Google something like “Linux check IOMMU groups” and you’ll find a way.)

Note that GPU passthrough invites a few bugs. You can’t always return the GPU to Linux after turning off the VM, depending on the GPU. (For a while, I got this fixed and could use my card after VM shutdown, but I’ve experienced a regression and haven’t been able to figure out what happened yet). Also, after I’ve run a VM and try to turn off the host, Linux doesn’t shut down clean sometimes and I have to manually press the power button.

As for distros, I actually don’t recommend Ubuntu anymore. I’ve found a severe decline in its performance compared to other distros and its privacy standards. I personally use Debian, but would recommend Pop OS as an easier distro. OpenSUSE and Fedora are good ones as well.

I’m sorry if I dropped a bunch of new terms without explaining them well. Ask me any questions. In return, may I ask what kind of desktop this is? Is it an ATX or ITX form factor or some sort of proprietary small form factor computer by HP or Dell or something that’s going to be miserable to upgrade?