I basically just gave three (or at least 2, as the DISCO one maybe is a bit iffy) examples of modern Star Trek scrutinizing the means despite the obstensibly good ends.

Also, another example is S2 E2 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” borderline almost literally puts “the moral cost of the means” (keeping good genetically modified people like Una out of Starfleet) that is ostensibly done for the ends of preventing another Eugenics Wars. I wouldn’t hesitate to call this episode one of the best in the whole franchise, very much in the tradition of court case ethical discussion episodes like “Measure of a Man”.

I don’t think one can make a blanket statement about newer Star Trek quitting “believing something”; sure, it may be uneven in quality (maybe more than classic)*, but dismissing all of “NuTrek” out of hand is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

: I mean, there’s whatever DIS season 2 was, Section 31, most of PIC, etc., but also, it’s not like good swathes of classic Trek aren’t also kind of crap - I mean, there’s the time Riker murdered his clone and nobody batted an eye, as well as TOS S3, TNG S1, and the inconsistency of VOY. Even in the good classic episodes, it’s not like every one is “do the ends justify the means” - in addition to other ethical themes, classic Trek still had room for simply "Cool sci-fi s** happened and we have to deal with it", not to mention episodes focused on interpersonal drama like “Data’s Day” or any of Deanna’s “Oh f*** my mother is on board” episodes.

I would say it depends.

I mean, the ends not justifying the means is kind of the entire point of DISCO S1 (whether or not the rest of DISCO embodied it is a different matter); Burnham has to let go of what Lorca summarizes as “Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for kings.” or in other words, the ends often justify the means.

Also, SNW is better about it, than say, PIC; for instance, SNW S3 E7 “What is Starfleet?” from 2025, for all its flaws (including in some ways being very similar to TNG “Tin Man”), basically has the crew going “WTF! The ends (saving an alien race from a war they didn’t start) do not justify the means (enslaving a sentient space whale)!” Also, SNW 1x06 is basically “ends don’t justify means”, although mostly because it basically copied “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.

Uploading a gz source archive to a Git repository is absolutely cursed. Still, looks like a cool project.

I’ll also add that if you do enable SSH and are stupid enough to expose port 22, then at least make sure you have key-based authentication instead of password authentication and keep your keys safe.

I could never get Gnome Network Displays to work, but it’s worth a shot.

Looks like that site is dead and has being an AI slop domain squat.

XFCE!

In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I’d choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.

Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be… weird. Like, I don’t quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it’s very opinionated and doesn’t like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.

A long time ago, I tried to tune a Piper voice using Majel Barrett’s speech from her reading of the novel “Q In Law”, but I didn’t get very far - just a small amount of training data collected.

I agree; for reasons other people have discussed in detail here, I think Majel Barrett is probably one of the least ethically ambiguous actors you can do this with.

I think KDEnlive is good as well, definitely the least terrible FOSS one. I never used Premiere Pro on that advanced a level, but for basic effects, keyframes, and title cards, it does quite well.

The main proprietary, “professional” one on Linux is Da Vinci Resolve, but I’ve never used it on Linux, since KDEnlive is just fine for me.

Honestly, in my opinion, every video editor is terrible to some extent; it’s having to deal with enormous amounts of data every second more than almost any other program on a computer, and even a semi-usable editor is a mind-bogglingly impressive feat.

Of course I don’t mean those art-stealing cannibals over at Adobe allowing them, I mean the Wine software allowing them, as it semantically implied.

Like I said, I wouldn’t touch Adobe with a 39.5 foot pole, but Photoshop is unfortunately necessary in those relatives’ industry, so getting on a high horse and telling them to use GIMP or Krita is not going to accomplish anything.

I’ve gotten used to GIMP and used it for a lot of cool thing (especially G’MIC for getting CD liner note scans looking quite good), but it’s just not a solution for serious professional use.

Not necessarily. It’s often less Calc’s capability that is at issue, and moreso its compatibility with imported sheets. Calc tends to have every feature I need when I make a spreadsheet.

I think the main issue I’ve seen is when people need bug-for-bug (or nearly so) compatibility with VB macros.

I personally never want to touch anything Adobe ever again, but for my father’s and grandfather’s use cases, they still need it, so if it ends up working well, maybe it’ll finally allow them to use Linux.

I believe 3.0 finally moved to Python 3. Resynthesizer was also totally rewritten for 3.0, but I don’t think it’s in Python anymore (?).

Post system specs here just to be safe. If it’s an older machine, there could be various hardware failures. “Monitors” makes it sound like a desktop, but you should clarify just to be safe, and perhaps indicate if has PCIe slots or is more of a mini PC.

Also, what do you mean by “monitors going dark”? Are the backlights on, or are they absolutely dark?

It’s probably not Secure Boot. I mean, worth a test, but it sounds like the issue occurs in the middle of a running session, which is not consistent with the issues sometimes presented by Secure Boot.

I usually use my device’s native boot menu these days; booting through GRUB usually triggers the Bitlocker screen.

Sounds like a freak accident rather than the fault of the VM.

I literally use a GPU for passthrough on my Windows 10 (and macOS) VM; PCIe is a much more complex protocol and much easier to F up than USB.

I’ve used my iPhone many times through Windows and been fine, as well as whole USB keyboards and mice (just simple ones); I think I might have even updated an iOS device once, though I can’t remember if I actually did. I’ve also used an iPod Nano 7th through an 11 LTSC VM before.

I could see some things being a little finicky, but simply managing a Zune with a VM probably causes no issues. It’s probably been eons since it got a firmware upgrade anyway.

That’s just a VM running atop Docker container; convenient, perhaps, but a little misleading to users who don’t understand how Docker works and might think it’s better performance-wise than a VM.

Dual boot isn’t that bad if you just use separate drives; the issue is only with Windows and Linux on one drive.

It’s not possible on all devices, but my laptop has dual NVMe slots, and I used to boot Linux off an SATA SSD and Windows off an NVMe on my desktop before getting rid of Windows and moving my Linux install to the NVMe drive. Never had a problem.

The only hiccup you’ll probably run into is exorbitant storage prices, although you can probably opt for less storage (256GB or 512GB), you can still get well below $100 and have it be perfectly fine.