I think your Adobe comment isn't quite right. I have two family members who are professional photographers and use Photoshop; Photoshop is so important to their workflow they can't give it up just to use Linux. They thus stick with Windows (though one's work had them using Macs for a bit, so they see it as acceptable).
In contrast, although I sometimes used Photoshop in hobbies (a euphemism for memes), I never used any features so specific to Photoshop that I couldn't just replace it with a combination of Inkscape and GIMP.
I think the truth is as much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is the best at what it does right now compared to competitors; GIMP 3.0 has a dismal UI and a weaker feature set, and the latter is largely true of a lot of the web-based editors as well.
This episode almost gives me Last Airbender "Tales of Ba Sing Se" vibes. It was especially nice to get to check in on a bunch of regular side characters for what might be the last time.
At the end of the episode, I was like, "Oh my gosh! It's that one random cadet!"
I also chuckled at Shax's conflict; I thought they were going to reveal he had been living with some sort of engramic virus or something after an accident.
The KMS timeouts almost make me wonder if the graphics chip is snorting some sort of crack.
Just to be safe, maybe try booting a live USB and see what happens. To be very sure, you could even try multiple distro/DE combos on the live disk.
If it's RAM, it should be easily replaceable on a laptop of that age. If it's the graphics chip, then it's probably time to find some other laptop. You can probably still press this to service in a homelab, though.
Old isn't necessarily bad. Also, as far as I can tell, distros are still patching 1.32. Based on my personal usage of LightDM and the fact that the project is still developed (based on commits to main), I'd say it's more of an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" dynamic. As for security, the active development suggests the developers would respond if there was a vulnerability - a big if, considering its last CVE was in 2017.
Personally, I love LightDM - it has just enough features while mostly sticking to its name (I mean, you're probably using GTK anyway).
The appearance of the D once again brings me back to the question - is each reality also in the year 2382, or is there a temporal differential that randomly varies?
There are a couple other instances begging this question:
Captain Tersal is wearing a TNG-era uniform. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to just say the uniform was never retired in her timeline and are intended to be kept largely the same like the monster maroons, but it still presents a possibility.
Boimler is able to read about alt-Boimler's missions on the alt-PADD. Does this mean alt-Boimler's timeline is a bit ahead, or is the PADD somehow maintaining its connection with the alternate timeline?
I might also add that it being a Galaxy Class Enterprise alone does not mean it is the D - we only know it's the Enterprise D because of Ransom calling it "the purple D".
I have my own theory that alt-Boimler is actually William Boimler tasked to replace his other self for mysterious Section 31 reasons. He even says "No one deserves to be replaced by their own clone."
However, that theory aside, I joke that there's a chain of modelling off alternate realities that spans the ship ranks, the various levels of admirals, the Federation presidency, the Travelers, the Q Continuum, and beyond.
As for the host system directory mounts, you got me there. There seems to be an option in the Virt Manager GUI, but it is kind of difficult to get working.
I've never used Virtualbox on Linux - it was what I used back when I was on Windows.
There was so much joyful “Eeeeee”-ing during this episode.