most of the apps written in Klingon would have the "today is a good day to die" directive, which means no exception handling at all and bringing the whole OS down in glory if needed
Does Chromecast has Bluetooth? If yes, setup a Bluetooth a2dp sink on your main PC and make the Chromecast device connect to it as audio output.
If not, your only option would be cables. Some TVs (I don't know if all, but all my previous TVs were like this) had their speaker and headphones outputs separately. You can set the speaker output volume with the remote, but the headphones have a different volume controller, independent from the "main" one.
Use a stereo jack splitter cable at your external speaker set and connect your PC and TV's headphone out to it. This way your TV can use the external speakers regardless what you watch on it.
A bit different approach would be to get a separate machine as your media player. Get some cheap ass 4th gen Intel small formfactor machines (like HP Elite SFFs or USDTs) and install libreELEC on it. It is much more capable than a chromecast device and you can hook up the PC itself to your speakers - either with Bluetooth or with a splitter cable. Or both; add a Bluetooth transmitter to the machine and a receiver with a splitter to the speaker.
Tho keep in mind that with wireless, some delay may occur.
I was thinking about going the Arch route, I really wanted to build up my system from scratch...
but then I was like "I'm too old for this sh*t", and I'm not even sure what I really want from my machine, so I was looking through distros... openSUSE was my other candidate, but I used Debian based systems and APT in the past 10 years... and I like the philosophy behind Debian, so installed Bookworm.
maybe, after a while when I know what I need, what I use and how I use them, will build my own Arch installation.
The Eragon series? It's not that heavy fantasy, but the world is pretty nicely built IMO.
Also, on the wizardy side, I can recommend the Bartimaeus books, too, if you liked Discworld. Again, nothing super serious, but they are fun reads. (Best to read from physical books, they are heavy on footnotes and I found it reading on e-readers kinda awkward)
yeah, most of my machines are around 3rd or 4th gen Intel, some of those are recent buys - one for libreELEC under my TV, one for remote work, one for my mother... unbelievably cheap machines, and with an SSD and 16GB of RAM, they run happily forever. (even with Windows 10)
I have an old Panasonic plasma and I was always a bit worried when I watch Star Trek (right from TOS) that those black bars on the side of the screen will damage the panel.
My problem was always that something was always a bit off with the apps or environment than I got used to, and most of thr times I just couldn't adapt. Things like my laptop touchpad worked differently, the mouse moved differently, apps had functions differently or lacking onebthing, others other things.
Also, most DEs was lacking functions (like dbl click on window icon to close), or were buggy. Then KDE4 came out and it was a trainwreck after 3.5 and I lost all my hope for a while.
And, on my mission to kinda solve these resulted always me bricking the system.
Now, to be fair, this was 10 years ago.
But, I know I won't use Windows 11 for a while now and I kinda bored with Windows 10 so few weeks ago installed Debian on my PC with KDE Plasma. Tho I have nothing against Windows, it served me well in the past... 25 years. But now I'm more focused on dev work and productivity, and Windows 10 became slowly awkward for the different works I had. Most of the times I used WSL so why not just hsve the realdeal at the first place? Also, lots of Pis and some servers I have are also running Linux, so why not have it on my main machine?
It's nice. Still have some minor annoyance or inconvenience with it, but I don't care. Honestly, seeing what Linux became in these 10 years made me go 'wow'.
So, I have hope in Linux in the future. Especially since OS and architectural boulders are rapidly disappearing.
I remember Wine being no more than a POC you can run Notepad or Solitaire on Linux. Now you can almost run any fucking game on a Linux system. This is awesome.
So, I'm testrunning Linux again before I invest a motherload of money into a new PC (I'm using a 2009 era server machine as my desktop atm) and if it's good, I will continue to use Linux and probably Debian on my new machine and will format my drives and set up a partition table that is Linux-y, and not just mount all my NTFS drives and use them like they are native to the system.
without any spoilers (at last season of VOY), is there any reason why /c/risa just got filled up to the brim with white ketracel in just one night? 😆