I hope whatever remedies the court decides upon to weaken Google's monopoly end up helping Firefox, otherwise it's just making Google a bigger monopoly. But this case was mostly about search, and I don't really trust the Justice Department or the courts to be this keenly aware of the state of web browsers.

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.

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).

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 was quite satisfied with Debian Stable for a few years on at least two different laptops, and felt I had found my "forever distro", until I got a Framework laptop whose AMD graphics were quite buggy on it. In order to get rid of all the issues, I had to upgrade to Testing and install a mainline Liquorix kernel (and along the way, I briefly made a Frankendebian and fiddled with kernel parameters). While my years of experience with Debian and derivatives has prevented me from breaking anything, I do wish I didn't have to use all of this beta-quality software just to prevent games from freezing and crashing constantly, just because I bought "new" (about a year old) hardware.

I still want to keep Debian, because I've found nothing else that works quite as elegantly or stably, but I'm hoping to find ways to get the performance I need without Liquorix, and if something forces me to reinstall between now and the time Debian Trixie becomes stable, I'll probably give Fedora or KDE Neon another try.

startrek.website too. maybe it's just a kbin-lemmy federation bug

You're looking at bootloaders, not kernels; you need to enroll the kernel with one of those bootloaders. Usually running sudo update-grub while in the OS will automatically detect and add any available kernels to the default version of GRUB.

If you can't boot into the OS, you can select the kernel manually from the GRUB command line: https://www.unix-ninja.com/p/Manually_booting_the_Linux_kernel_from_GRUB

You can start anywhere you want! I often recommend starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation, since it's aged a little better than the original series. You might prefer to jump ahead to season 2 or 3 to get to the really good stuff, but even season 1 is worth watching.

Up until Enterprise season 3 it's pretty much all episodic (or in DS9's case, mostly episodic with a subset of the episodes forming a series-long story arc), so you can pick a random episode or movie with a cool-sounding description and start there if you want. That's how I got into Trek, just picking random TNG and Voyager episodes.

You're basically describing the Linux Standard Base, which was abandoned back in 2015 and the way it was handled was somewhat controversial.

But there is a lot of informal standardization between Linuxes, nonetheless.

I haven't tried this myself, but do you happen to know exactly which model of MacBook you have?

I did some searching and found a (very old) Debian Wiki article saying that the MacBook 1,1 and 2,1 require 32-bit UEFI, and in the case of the 2,1, this is despite the CPU being 64-bit. Though that's unlikely to be the case here given that those Ubuntu variants reach the boot screen.

Between the three I'd go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they've both made some decisions in recent years that I don't like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn't have any issues with Mint.

Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you'll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven't heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.

There is a complete set of free assets, in the form of Freedoom. Also, the official Steam version is closed-source, so make sure you're getting a free source port. (Most distros have a few in their repos, and Freedoom+GZDoom is also in Flathub.)