Both words are also pronounced the same in the majority of regions in England, or anywhere that doesn’t do that “rrrrrrrr” thing.

It’s covered a bit in this article: Ex-Astris-Scientia.org - Star Trek Races with Changing Faces

My understanding of the above is it’s basically likely to be a mistake. It’s suspected they used bluescreening (we tend to use greenscreening these days with digital video, but blue was common back then with film) to overlay the different versions of Lal - and may have been worried about the blue Andorian getting mixed up with the background and becoming transparent - so they changed the colour of the person being filmed, then tried to correct it in post-production… and failed. This hasn’t been officially confirmed anywhere, but it seems a reasonable explanation.

An in-universe explanation suggests that green Andorians are Andorian/Aenar hybrids - but the holographic Lal here is not so much green-skinned as lit up with a green glowing light.

A “meh-hawk”?

I think Ubuntu has a long way to go to “Microsoft levels”, but yeah, some of their actions are why people are less keen to recommend them to new users (and why I don’t myself). As the other person said, Mint is separate to that - it’s a bit like “Ubuntu with the crap removed”.

I did this for my dad, and then his neighbour… and then his other neighbours… also for quite a few older people near where I live.

Anyway, assuming the initial setup goes okay with wifi/printers etc and all the software is present, then it’s pretty much hands-off most of the time - though they’ll likely have 100 tiny questions initially, none of which they feel are “worth troubling you with” - so you may need to nudge them every few weeks a few times, and if possible go over and check things yourself.

There may be a sense of not wanting to bother you, or embarrassment about a mistake, then they just put up with it - for example, accidentally zooming in in the file browser, so all the files are massive, then just putting up with it instead of “bothering you”.

Any solving you do, you can show them where you find the answer/option e.g. teaching them to search the mint forums - but also knowing the Ubuntu ones will mostly work too (and for some things, any Linux ones).

You’ll need to remind them about updating, because it’s not forced on them, and if they’re prevously Windows/Mac users, they may distrust updates. You may also need to be on hand for version upgrades, at least in the first year, depending on how computer-literate they were previously.

It’s worth setting up some sort of backup with them, and setting up autosaves for office programs - then making symlink shortcuts to where those autosaves are kept. Generally you’re looking for ways to undo the panic if things go wrong - “here’s how to reverse it if you lose it/break it”.

Assuming you’re putting an adblocker on, you will probably need to show them how to update it and how to disable it if absolutely required by a website.

Check there’s something in place to transfer photos from their phone/camera etc - or any other use case where they want to transfer things on/off the computer - this might include things like “Calibre” for ebooks, or “Shotwell” for photos for instance.

Other than that… depends on the specific person and what they’re doing.

Generally though, Mint is pretty intuitive, especially if they used older Windowses - so you may find (as I did) there’s almost no support needed once it’s up and running.

NTFS was around in the 1990s, exFAT is from the 2010s - and I think was also caught up in some sort of copyright/proprietary shit for another 10 years. There are brand new 2025 TVs which still won’t read exFAT.

I’m mostly echoing what’s already been said, but I have a preset in Handbrake for this, which works fine on most TVs I’ve tried from the last 10 years (possibly 15 by now) and therefore should have no problem running on any computer. I often (for work reasons) prepare video footage for looped playback on TVs and projectors at numerous places - so “TVs I’ve tried” is a larger number than it might initially sound like.

It’s roughly along these lines (as I appear to have emailed someone about before):

"H264 mp4. 1920x1080. 25 or 30fps, or similar (appropriate to source material). Constant bitrate <=12mbps. 8mbps is generally universally compatible, though you should be able to get away with 10-12mbps on newer TVs with newer USB sticks.

AAC audio 192kbps, though lower is fine.

Use same samplerate as source (i.e. 44khz 48khz etc)

If you’ve got settings for encoding profile, Main and Level 4.0 should work.

If individual files are small enough (<4GB), format the USB stick as FAT32. Otherwise NTFS. EXT2 will work on a lot of TVs, but you’ll have trouble with some computers. Exfat may work on newest tellys, but won’t on anything more than a few years old, so safe option is not to use it."

“The holodeck malfunctions and causes a series of dangerous events”

You may already have the answer from the other comments - but specifically for subtitle transcription, I’ve used whisper and set it to output directly into SRT, which I could then import directly into kdenlive or VLC or whatever, with timecodes and everything. It seemed accurate enough that the editing of the subs afterwards was almost non-existant.

I can’t remember how I installed Whisper in the first place, but I know (from pressing the up arrow in terminal 50 times) that the command I used was:

whisper FILENAME.MP3 --model medium.en --language English --output_format srt

I was surprised/terrified how accurate the output was - and this was a variety of accents from Northern England and rural Scotland. A few minutes of correcting mistakes only.

At their heart, most distros are approximately “made of the same stuff”. There’s differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the “software centre” works), but essentially the difference between a “gaming distro”, “normal distro” and “creative distro” is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.

Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.

Thanks. I tend to worry with redesigns these days.

(Based on the screenshot only) Where’s the menu gone?

I find that joining pieces of sheet metal together with compressed mechanical fittings is riveting.

All solid advice. May also have an ingredient sensitivity to something like “sodium laureth sulphate”, which can cause dry skin and flaking, or massively inflame existing psoriasis or dry skin.

…or inflate it further. Double it.

I don’t even think there’d be that much disagreement.

“Oh, do you hate ‘libs’ and love Putin too?”

Or “Minors always granted access”

This is brilliant and inspiring. I’m so thankful for people like this, using their skills for the benefit of everyone.

I kind of like it. I say bring it back.

If we all started using it, þen sooner or later it would start showing up in AI generated answers.

There’s quite a lot needed from peripheral manufacturers, regarding drivers and utilities. You still can’t, for example, just buy any new printer or scanner - you have to check compatibility first.