BananaTrifleViolin

I’m pretty sure its the one the where Janeway and Tom Paris get in a transporter accident and become “Janris”. They drank copious amounts of coffee while hitting on any one with a pulse, until the Doctor deleted his own ethical routines to save the crew.

The price does seems about right to me. The whole sale prices are currently about £75 but looking back prices are usually a bit higher and apparently post-2022 energy shock, average around £80-£94 (ignoring the peak of the energy shock itself). They’re well above the pre 2022 prices, but I don’t think it’s thought likely prices will be coming back to those levels in the near future.

This is run under the “Contract for Differences” framework - when the price is below the minimum price the producers get a subsidy to close the gap (so if it’s £75, the producers get £15 per MWh) but if it’s above the £91.20 minimum price they pay the difference back. It’ll encourage build out, gives the developers stable revenue and predictability and helps smooths out volatility in prices overall.

This is only really a bad price if the average wholesale price is likely to go substantially back down below £80 long term. That doesn’t seem likely as we still have the major drivers of high energy prices: UK wholesale prices are driven by gas prices (as the marginal producer), with reduced cheaper piped gas supplies due to the Ukraine causing a likely permanent reliance on expensive LNG as the new floor for gas prices. So it’s unlikely we’ll go back to the old cheap gas prices from prior to 2022 - even if the Ukraine war ends tomorrow, Europe strategically is not going to rely on Russian gas and will continue to use LNG, and LNG stays the marginal producer (not piped gas even if we use more). That’s not even taking into account the green side of this.

UK whole sale energy prices won’t drop substantially until gas is permanently replaced as the marginal producer (i.e. the last most expensive supplier to provide energy is no longer expensive gas power stations and something cheaper). That won’t happen until wind and solar are ubiquitous and we have good energy storage infrastructure to ensure we don’t need gas whenever renewable production is below what is needed moment to moment. That seems a long way off still (although this wind build out should help move closer) - in the meantime LNG will likely set the UK wholesale prices, and it’s unlikely to get much cheaper than where it is now. If anything, if there is anothere energy shock, it’ll go up.

I think it’s really matured in the last few years. I’ve used linux on and off for the last 20 years, but things only tipped in favour for me at least about 2 years ago. For me it’s a combination of the polish of KDE, and the maturity of Wine/Proton for gaming. Before that I was dual booting but spending most time in Windows because I’d get in the habit whenever I started playing a game.

So I think despite the jokes, now really is the “year of the linux desktop” because it’s finally tipped over to being an all round 24/7 good choice for most people.

I’d go with Fedora. If you will be their source of help, then it makes sense you know it. It’s also a widely known, stable distro with good and reliable packaging.

Mint is a good distro but there is a huge load of outdated advice out there, and I think it’s getting risky as a result. Like I still keep seeing tips to add 3rd party repos to install software, rather than pointing to things like Flatpak. However it remains very userfriendly and there is loads of support out there, so it’s still a great choice.

Another consideration is Fedora offers a better selection of DEs to use “officially”. Personally I like KDE, but also having Gnome available as a default option is good. Mint is somewhat limited in that respect by focusing on Cinnamon, Mate and XFCE as the official spins. They’re all decent but I feel like people coming into Linux should be introduced to the big 2. When I mained Mint a few years ago, I moved to KDE and it was actually a little frustrating how bloated it got to have lots of unneeded Cinnamon tools left behind, and some essential to the system.

I’d avoid Ubuntu. It’s big but it’s increasingly compromised by Cannonical’s behaviour, and personally I object to Snap. Snap as a technology is fine but the Snap store is closed source and controlled by Cannonical. And in Ubuntu so many apps are forced onto users as Snaps now - for example web browsers which are slow to start up. This is not a good experience for users.