For battery life, I’d recommend you install CoreCtrl so you can adjust your power settings. That, combined with a few other things (I think the Arch Wiki covers most of them) allows me to get quite a lot out of my Thinkpad in Debian.

I guess you can always remember the skin balloon from Doctor Who… unless you’ve never watched Doctor Who, in which case forget I ever said anything.

If you go to their website, there is a picture of a Tendi, but it is mildly terrifying. You have been warned.

I’ve had a good time with my Thinkpad E16 Gen 1 over the past few months (definitely lower spec than your machine - pretty much all of them have only an iGPU). A lot of them are still upgradable - I upgraded mine from 8GB of RAM to 24GB, and the thing had dual drive bays, so I just left the stock 256GB Windows drive and put in a 2TB alongside it for Linux stuff.

As long as you have a recent kernel, hardware support is decent, so long as you avoid the models with Realtek (my E16 does have Realtek, but I managed to smooth out issues).

I just wish there were no mysterious threats…

They’ve said it’s coming in early this year - there’s literally a clip of it out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=llvMv5-ydyQ&t=150s&pp=2AGWAZACAQ%3D%3D. It definitely looks near done.

Also, season 4 seems to already be in pre-production.

I think that’s partly why I love and gravitate towards DS9, from the culture wars allegory to analysis of imperialism to the ethics of terrorism and beyond.

I think the beauty of DS9 is you have very different characters evolving together and shows people with different world views can still develop working respect and friendship with each other.

I agree in some senses with the stand-alone part, but not necessarily the animated part. I feel like it would just need to be marketed right. Executives are convinced for the most part that animation is either only for kids or for irreverent adult comedies, when it really should be viewed as a general medium.

I think Infinity Train is the best evidence of my point (look it up if you don’t know); it really transcends the typical bounds assigned to animation. Book 3 especially is truly just a great fantasy/sci-fi drama. However, it was basically killed by executives who wanted a tax write-off and couldn’t see its potential outside a “kids show”. Now some of the series is purchasable on various online storefronts, but the only legal way to watch all of Book 3 is to pirate it.

If executives and people alike would liberate themselves from the stigma of animation, I feel like you could pull off high-quality, TNG-length seasons that allow less rushed charater development for a reasonable budget compared to an expensive live action streaming show. In some ways, Prodigy was an example of this - I felt like I got more time with the characters than almost any other modern Trek (granted SNW is still going on).

I’ve never met a person where I mentioned Star Trek and they went, “Ew, Discovery. I’m never watching any Star Trek ever again”; I think Discovery had its flaws (and strengths), but it made little impact on franchise popularity.

Usually (which you touch on), it’s more like they’re just bamboozled by the cannon. Like, I was watching DS9 once, and my roommate asked if it was the original, which then brought a long and complicated explanation from me. I think you’re right that it’d be very nice to have a Star Trek show that one could show to people where when old lore is brought in, it’s delivered in such a way that people can pick it up as they go.

Un-cancel Lower Decks. 😉

Honestly, though, I feel like most media groups in general forget why the streaming model worked in the first place. They want Office-level hits, but forget that The Office wasn’t immediately successful. Not immediately killing it just because of that gave it time to find a fandom.

Most shows should automatically get 2-3 seasons, and they often aren’t getting that.

As for the whole “none of them knew what Star Trek was” anecdote - I find that a bit exaggerated. I’m a college student, and I wore a Boimler costume for Halloween- most could identify that I was something Star Trek. Around other people my age, they can at least think of Spock or Patrick Stewart.

How I got into Trek as a kid was my mom would be watching it, and she’d let us join even though we were supposed to be doing homework. TNG was the one I saw the most during that.

P.S: As I’ve floated around this forum several times, I think an animated anthology series of strange new crews would be awesome.

I really wish we’d gotten more T’Lyn time. She needed at least one more episode focused on her.

Amateurs. (I think I’ve watched almost every episode 3 times at least. The main exceptions are a few random season 1 episodes and “A Mathematically Perfect Redemption”.)

But what about those kids in TOS who all joined a cult and murdered their parents for fun or something?

BTW usually the graphics glitches weren’t immediate, but would come after waking it from sleep a few times.

As an ex-Linux on Surface Go 1 user, I didn’t like the experience. Under Debian Testing, it was always mostly usable, but I’d come across the weirdest bugs, like graphics glitches. Also, last time I checked, the camera was miserable to set up - I got it working, but it’s really weird. Secure boot was also really painful.

Running Linux on the Surface Go made me curse the Surface line and put the Go in a junk drawer. I might go back to it one day, but I have no reason at the moment. Still, if you already own one, it’s worth a shot.

If you go ahead, though:

1. Whatever easily supported the linux-surface kernel.
2. I really don’t know. I don’t quite use Linux in that manner.
3. No. SD cards are slow, so the system will take an eternity to load. Put personal files on the SD and the install internal, not the other way around.
4. I have no idea about the pen, but the keyboard mostly worked fine. I remember it having problems in the Debian installer, so I had to use a USB hub dongle and a keyboard to install, but after that I remember it working pretty well both mainline and linux-surface.

Also, I feel like an awesome Star Trek series would be a (preferably animated) semi-anthology where you have a few crews a season that then meet up in a finale subplot, sort of like taking LD:”Wej Duj” and focusing on each individual crew and culture more. My ideas are:

• “Cetacean Ops”, which would take place on the USS George and Gracie (or something), a starship (either prototype or refit) built for and staffed by aquatic/cetacean life forms, except a few engineers. Besides exploring what cetacean life style is like in the Federation and Starfleet, as well as how they avoid isolation between aquatic and non-aquatic crew.
• One that’s literally just the Archimedes from the Lower Decks Season 2 finale. I really liked that crew for some reason and want more.
• Several non-Federation species vessels, like a Ferengi starship or a post-Dominion Cardassian vessel.

Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.

Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn’t be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).

Stares in Debian Testing. (Though I use Bookworm on my laptop, probably soon to be Trixie. Nice thing about Trixie is I’ll no longer have to use the Backports kernel on my Thinkpad and can just stay on the LTS one.)

Let’s just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.

I’m not sure about NVIDIA drivers. Otherwise, it depends on what kernel your distro is using; if it’s Debian, there’s a chance you might have problems, though you could install the backports kernel, which I do on my Thinkpad E16.