The machine I have running mint is a fifteen year old Core 2 Duo T6600 laptop. Works great!

Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.

Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!

He didn’t command, direct, or approve of any of their methods. He only benefited, and protected, with disgust and grief for the values he once held dear.

So… I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all… I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would. Garak was right about one thing, a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it… Computer, erase that entire personal log.

Truly disgusted and grief stricken.

In fairness to requiring “excellence”, I’d imagine most professionals have excellent skills in their field compared to the average person.

Realistically (i.e., not in Star Trek), a ship traveling toward something will have its engine cone pointed towards it as it decelerates for rendezvous.

Was a central aspect of the story in Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Star Trek transporters are “destroy and reconstitute” though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.

“Nature” also has lots of suffering in it even without our help. I agree we shouldn’t cause undue harm, but the suggestion that animals won’t suffer without us is naïve at best.

My condolences for your kitty, but nature would not have granted her the more peaceful end you gave her.

They don’t even have to go down. Staying stable or even going up at a consistent rate are both considered failure states, or at least unfavorable. If the rate of growth is not itself growing then they start worrying.

It’s insane.

Yes. It’s a commercial signage display, not intended for desktop use.

Totally agree that a lot of them are poor implementations. Or just have a terrible UX such that it’s almost guaranteed that a layperson is going to set it up badly and have a degraded experience that they’ve convinced themselves is good. Obviously the “correct” thing to do is check every box for “enhancements”, right?

Gaming peripheral software supplied by the OEM being bad is probably the least surprising thing I’m likely to read all day.

As for stereo sounding better, I think in the purest sense that’s always going to be true. Any kind of processing is going to alter the audio to some degree away from the original “intent”. A pure triangle wave from a NES isn’t going to be a pure triangle wave after it goes through any HRTF, good, bad, or otherwise. If you want your sound to be clean then yes, avoid extra processing at all costs.

First, I apologise for assuming you were uninformed. That’s clearly not the case.

I agree that if a game has its own headphone surround solution then that’s preferable to anything external to the game. And yes, turning on both just mangles your sound and should not ever be done.

A theoretical game that doesn’t have its own HRTF doesn’t need to provide full soundscape details for a external virtual surround to work though. It just won’t be as good. If the game can output 7.1 audio but lacks HRTF for headphones the processor can at least use the surround channel positions to inform an HRTF, so that the right rear channel sounds like it’s behind you and to the right, etc. If the game is stereo only, maybe you want your NES emulator audio to sound like it’s coming from the screen in front of you instead of strapped to your head.

All that aside though, OP also didn’t mention games. Maybe he’s got some DTS7.1 movies he wants to watch, in which case HRTF by channel position is the only option.

You should read up on head related transfer functions. Virtual surround is much more than just “an audio equaliser that makes footsteps louder”.

My breaking point was when the dotnet CLI installed as a snap, which of course isolated its environment, which made it unable to interoperate correctly with the projects I was trying to build.

Asinine.

I chimed in with a, “haven’t you people ever heard of closing the [conspicuous empty beat] damned door?!”

See also: Moriarty

Literally the opposite of what they wanted.

Even if they don’t, OP’s friend could just give OP a copy of his GOG version.

GOG games are DRM free and do not need to be cracked. They’re freely shareable as-is.

The question is whether the crossplay works between the Steam and GOG versions, and a quick Google shows that the answer is yes.