"I can't stop the heterocyclic declination!" (TNG: "Samaritan Snare")

If my American university has a system in place for students that don't own Windows, I would not be surprised if yours has a better one :)

LibreOffice has opened every DOC(X) the school has sent me, albeit imperfectly, and all assignments are turned in as PDFs, which I usually make using Markdown and LaTeX. I have had to use Office 365 for collaboration, but only about twice a year, and that runs very smoothly in Firefox. On one occasion I tried to collaborate with CryptPad, but it didn't work as well as I hoped.

Most computer labs at my uni run Windows 10, rarely 11, but a lot of the science labs run Linux. A surprising amount of the software required for classes has been open-source, too.

The most frustrating thing has been the lockdown browser used for some exams. My university library has computers I can borrow for exams, but yours might not, and they detect VMs, so you might have to dual boot for that.

Yeah, only thing I can think of is the few banking apps that don't have web versions.

I was lucky enough to have all my banking and 2FA apps work perfectly on GrapheneOS. The only app that gave me a significant amount of trouble was iClicker, which my school uses for attendance. That was fixed by enabling Google Play location services, and there was a (fairly expensive) alternative anyway.

I did have to buy a new phone to use Graphene, because I got my previous one as part of a carrier's cell plan, and it had a locked BIOS. Though I think the purchase was worth it, and just moving my SIM card from one device to another was enough to get it working.

"Move Along Home" would work so much better as a Doctor Who episode. Has a kind of absurdity that is perfect for Who, but stands out in a bad way in Trek.

I don't have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

For a while I daily drove a Purism Librem 14 with Debian's fully free kernel, and installed as few non-free packages as possible, including firmware blobs (which I didn't install any of until I decided I needed Bluetooth). My experience with gaming was generally fine.

With linux-libre you really have to buy your hardware specifically with support in mind. You're limited to Intel and non-bleeding-edge AMD graphics cards, a very small range of wifi cards, and no Bluetooth. Otherwise, video games should work as well as they would on any other computers with the same specs. Especially if you're also limiting yourself to games with free engines - I'm not aware of a single libre game that demands more than a modern Intel integrated graphics card can provide, even on high settings.

Handbrake will probably still work if you compile it from source, but it seems like upstream isn't paying much attention to libdvdcss support.

The version in Debian's repo still works for me, anyway.

I've never used these, but I've come across them while scrolling through F-Droid and they seem to fit this use case:

Kotatsu
Kinoko

I'll probably use Codeberg or another Forgejo server for my next programming project, if/when I have one that is far enough along to publish (motivating myself to get that far is a tall task). Until then, everything I'd consider contributing to is either on GitHub, or is self-hosting some other software, so I don't have a reason to create an account yet.

Saru and Kelvin Spock would probably get along really well. Everyone else would be having heated arguments that I think would be amazing to witness, if not take part in.

I think I'd most like to sit between Mariner and Pike, though.

If you haven't set up this laptop yet, then I'd suggest installing a server-oriented distro like Debian, AlmaLinux, or Ubuntu Server. Those have minimal install options that come without a desktop environment installed, as most servers do not need one. If you'd like to make the install harder for yourself, this might be a good excuse to give Arch Linux or Gentoo a try, as those have the option of a fully manual install. If you'd like, you can install a desktop environment afterwards using the package manager.

If you already have a Linux with a graphical desktop installed, you can configure the system not to automatically start it with sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target. (Do not do this on your main device!) You can re-enable it with sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target.

Regardless, you can then start a graphical session using startx, or whatever command is more appropriate for your desktop environment (gnome-session to start GNOME on Wayland, startplasma-wayland to start KDE Plasma), or by sudo systemctl starting your login screen manager (sddm, gdm, lightdm, etc).

Assuming you mean the Beelink S12 (which is the first thing that comes up in a search for "n100 mini pc"), that's quite similar to my own computer specs, which can run just about any distro, with enough resources to spare for a VM or two. I don't think it's necessary to go really lightweight or pick something special. If there's a distro you're already familiar with and know you can do all of those things on, install that.

If you like Garuda, you could always try a different Arch spin which is lighter out of the box, like CachyOS or EndeavourOS.

I've switched to FreeTube for now, it still works using the Invidious API. This is happening because YouTube is testing forced login to watch videos or use the API. There is a workaround it seems, but we'll have to wait for all the major clients to roll it out.

Unlikely. While in theory someone could create a compatibility layer, it would be quite a challenge, as obviously, kernel modules are very closely tied to the specific kernel. I did some web searches, and only found the same few dead projects (that didn't completely solve this issue anyway) that you found, and other forum posts that offer little encouragement.

Make sure you have the latest version of Windows 10 or 11, and the latest drivers for your network hardware. If you do, then there's probably not much you can do about this.

I'm against a megathread. That would be too busy and I think there will be more than enough to discuss about each episode.

For entirely selfish reasons, I'd like individual discussion threads for each episode that come out one or two a day, since that's the pace I expect to be watching it (optimistically).

Though, I think the best option for everyone might be five-episode blocks. That would allow both bingewatchers and slower viewers to enjoy the conversation without spamming the feed, and will match up well enough with the "parts" it would have been split into if it aired on Nickelodeon that both broad and individual episode discussions will make sense.

I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a mix between Starfleet and Vau N'Akat dress.

Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won't be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function

Now I'm (tentatively) excited to see how they'll outdo a season with a novel gimmick in each and every episode, including a musical and a crossover with a parody show, in terms of gimmicky weirdness.

Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.

It might not be Wayland-related at all.