UEFI first became common on new computers in 2011-2012, so I don’t a lot of 2014 computers were BIOS.

I have a cheapo laptop from 2012 (one of last Gateways) and it’s a UEFI machine.

At this point, I think 15 years ago is a more realistic estimate for the last legacy BIOS machines - my Win7 box with a 1st gen i5 is legacy BIOS.

If only Apple Music would give Linux users some way to access lossless…

Though honestly, I’m only on Apple Music because my parents pay for it anyway (I’m a college kid), and I’ve already started accumulating a CD/digital audio file collection, which currently covers the first 6 studio albums plus albums 8 and 21 plus 1 B sides compilation, 1 single, half a live album, an album demos compilation, and 1 single.

Although the 256kpbs limitation on the browser isn’t the worst (better than a lot of video streaming services forcing 480p on unapproved devices), it still irks me.

Mostly, he uses Photoshop for printing, though, and I don’t know if Krita has as powerful a printing dialog.

My grandfather asked me about Linux, but unfortunately, he’s still using Photoshop for now.

+1 for Clevis. I’ve been using it on my laptop for a year and it works like a charm. Sometimes, you need to update bindings after kernel updates, but it’s overall quite smooth.

From what I’ve heard, ROCm may be finally getting out of its infancy; at the very least, I think by the time we get something useful, local, and ethical, it will be pretty well-developed.

Honestly, though, I’m in the same boat as you and actively try to avoid most AI stuff on my laptop. The only “AI” thing I use is I occasionally do an image upscale. I find it kind of useless on photos, but it’s sometimes helpful when doing vector traces on bitmap graphics with flat colors; Inkscape’s results aren’t always good with lower resolution images, so putting that specific kind of graphic through “cartoon mode” upscales sometimes improves results dramatically for me.

Of course, I don’t have GPU ML acceleration, so it just runs on the CPU; it’s a bit slow, but still less than 10 minutes.

I don’t know why, but I feel cheated that we don’t get an Enterprise J model - what else am I going to use as my weirdly-shaped dinner plate?

I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.

Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.

Is there an old AARCH64 laptop (sub-$100, preferably closer to $50) that can be picked up for a song for playing around with crap like this?

From what I can tell, there’s a lot of crappy old ARM Chromebooks; I wonder if they perform sufficiently faster than an RPi and work well enough with a Linux distro to mess with them. I do wonder, though, if any Windows-on-ARM ones are old enough to also be cheap used (and not be some sort of Windows RT terror or something).

Actually looking at it, my impression has softened a bit. I think I just was struggling with the perspective.

I like the proportions of the earlier concept better - I like big nacelles.

That… is kind of ugly. It’s unimaginative - feels too much like an airplane or a cheap-as-heck shuttle model. It brings up the worst of late-90s/early 2000s blobject design.

It would definitely feel more at home as background ship, but this is not the design of a hero ship. It doesn’t even have to be the traditional Roddenberry-type design; something looking more like the Dove from Lower Decks would be better than this.

You’re forgetting Ad Homicide: Just because you killed someone doesn’t mean you’re right.

(And of course, its vice versa, just because you (or someone with your views) got killed doesn’t mean you’re right, which admittedly is less common in history, but nonetheless something to be aware of to evaluate arguments critically.)

I mean, that’s fair.

I feel that somewhat by accident, Lower Decks does better capture some aspects of classic Trek than other series, namely being mostly episodic and bringing a sense of humor back to Trek, and it sometimes even attains a level of dramatic skill comparable to the best of classic Trek (namely above all else the exchange between Mariner and Ma’ah in the S4 finale). Also, I’m honestly really impressed that Lower Decks managed to get me attached to its characters and make it feel like they’ve evolved so much in a total runtime less than that of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That said, Lower Decks does lack the mellow charm and the long(er)-form storytelling of classic Trek. However, considering the Trekiness they otherwise pulled off, I kind of wonder how the Lower Decks writers would do if they were given the opportunity to do a 50 minute “standard” Trek series; I think they might be able to do pretty well.

Similarly, with SNW, while it has some of the strongest writing of social interaction, the sci-fi aspect is often weaker than it should be. For instance, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” is almost a brain-dead premise in terms of science fiction, but executed so well in terms of the social dynamics and character writing.

In other words, I can see your desire for a no-compromises, no catches Trek.

Oh yeh. I heard that, just forgot. Thanks for reminding me.

At this point, I’d wonder if some of the older Microsoft Surfaces might be suitable for this purpose. Especially if it’s just displaying photos, you probably wouldn’t even need the Linux-Surface kernel for a lot of things and could just run mainline, avoiding a lot of misery. For instance, a 1st gen Surface Go from 2018 seems to run for ~$70 on eBay these days; I own one and used to daily-drive it on both Windows and Linux, and although there were some annoyances, the display is decent.

Though honestly, I wonder if you particularly need a Linux tablet at all. There are dedicated digital frame devices out there for displaying photos; a lot of them can just display off a USB drive or SD card in the ballpark of 50 bucks it looks like. I’d probably recommend not getting one that supports Wi-Fi, as I think it’s probably a stupid idea to assume some random cheap device you bought online has correctly-implemented network security.

When you put it that way, I agree.

TNG made a point to avoid doing this as much as possible, and it ultimately worked and arguably usurped the original.

I guess that’s also part of the strength of Lower Decks and somewhat Prodigy; both shows are the only ones of this wave to be mostly focused on original characters. Lower Decks does bring in legacy characters frequently, and Prodigy does have Hologram Janeway and later starts to heavily feature legacy characters as part of the storyline, but both have an original cast as the core of the show that isn’t anyone we know’s brother or cousin. I superficially thought about this, but didn’t think about it in comparison to the other newer Treks before.

I mean, if they struck a balance, it could be enjoyable enough.

It’s not a dynamic we’ve fully explored in Trek. We kind of got it with adult Jake and Captain Sisko in the later seasons of DS9, but we haven’t really fully seen the experience of a Starfleet empty nester.

Still, drama after drama is rather annoying.

After being disgusted by the horribly-done pre-school show, I’d much rather see a Star Trek done in the spirit of Craig of the Creek and Bluey that’s about a friend group of kids running around a star base and getting into fun and trouble and low-stakes ethical dilemmas, preferably while their parents (the crew and civilian residents) deal with DS9 levels of heavy stuff. After saying this to my younger sibling, they have a more developed pitch, having sketched up some concept art for fun.

I would certainly not reject a well-written Lower Decks season 6, so I don’t agree on the animated comedy front.

It has its weaknesses, but I think you should watch it if just to form your own opinion.

I’ve only watched through the middle of season 4, where I got a bit tired of it, though I might pick it back up.

Season 1 is interesting, season 2 is weird, and season 3 has its flaws but keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Season 4 I feel like squanders the new setting introduced in season 3; the plot they introduce feels so artificial to me, which is very upsetting because it feels like the new setting has so many stories that would practically write themselves even if you do decide to lean on “Big Bad Villain/Problem” storytelling.

Actually, they were stored across the entire station’s computer systems; only part of them was in Quark’s holosuite. It basically took every bit of storage on DS9 to store them.