Maybe Fedora?

Personally, though, I’m a Debian guy - Testing on my desktop and stable with Flatpaks and a few backports on my laptop.

Who would have thought? I’ve hardly touched Windows in over 2 years (mostly other people’s computers and the occasional app in my GPU-accelerated VM) so I haven’t kept up much.

“Blue barrels have no honor!”

According to the repair manual, my Wi-Fi card is actually replaceable, at least physically. I don’t know if Lenovo still does BIOS whitelists of cards like they used to (I think they did remove it a few years back.), but their OEM parts website has a diverse selection if this fix were ever to break.

I’d say other than the bottom being a bother to remove (and the keyboard not being designed to be replaced, though after some research, it seems possible), this is a surprisingly repairable laptop for how recent it it.

I totally agree with you on the Linux side. However, I first got into Linux by using it in Virtualbox on Windows. In the Windows world, as far as I know, it’s the easiest-to-use free-as-in-beer¹ hypervisor, so long as UEFI support has improved since I last used it.

1: I say this because of the non-libre extension pack.

As I have learned the hard way, it truly is.

I agree with Mint. I think Ubuntu has kind of devolved though, and PopOS is the better way to go. Fedora’s good too these days.

My recommendation is to try out a few distros in VirtualBox before switching - this was my process, and it can be very gradual.

I don’t use Mint, but I would guess that you could change your repos in /etc/apt/sources.list, run sudo apt update, and then sudo apt full-upgrade. Just make sure the full upgrade isn’t doing really dumb stuff like deleting a bunch of programs.

I could be completely wrong and this could be terrible advice, but this has become the wisdom for me when I use Debian Testing. Of course, I just did straight sudo apt update after Bookworm was released and the upgrade to Trixie went mostly fine. I have never upgraded between stable versions, so I may not be one to say.

As a younger fan, for the longest time, I avoided Lower Decks as I’m not usually into the adult animation comedy genre. I first watched it late last year and have rewatched the whole thing 3 or 4 times total since (though I often start around “Terminal Provocations” as I don’t enjoy earlier episodes as much.).

Me and my siblings would often watch whatever Trek my mom was watching before eventually doing our own watch throughs.

We can always hope Prodigy will pull off a season 3.