Fun (or maybe not so fun) fact about that episode is that it was actually intended to be the finale of season 1. Brannon Braga wanted to make it a two-parter leading into season 2, but nobody else on the staff felt that ending their first season with a cliffhanger would be a good idea. So, instead, they compressed it down and made it a regular episode. Braga really wanted to explore this story more though.
I was just noticing last night that season 2 of Voyger seem's to be quite a bit better in quality, relatively speaking, than the 2nd seasons of it's older siblings TNG and DS9. Mostly GREAT episodes, this included. Except for episode 15. We don't talk about episode 15.
Edit: I did the math and DS9 edges out Voyager when you compare each show's season 1 to season 2, but they're both statistically higher than TNG.
I'm sure it doesn't help that motherboard manufacturers have increasingly been targeting "whale" consumers over the last 10-15 years. I remember when a top of the line motherboard would cost you $300; and an average board was around $100-150.
At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them.
When discussing the pressures the company faces when releasing a game in early access, such as audience expectations, Vincke told us, "Interestingly, another [issue Larian is facing] is really the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and f**k, man. It's like, literally, we've never had it like this."
He continued, "It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about it because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It's gonna be an interesting one. It means that most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time. So it's challenging, but it's video games."
I'm throwing in my vote for CachyOS. Not because it's the easiest to use (though it isnt difficult imo) but because it works out of the box, then they have nice wiki to guide you through simple things (like using Lutris and Proton). It's also Arch based so there's the arch wiki to fall back on. I ran Windows for 35 years and just switched to Linux in like October, fwiw.
Path of Exile 2 started working in wayland native (proton_enable_wayland) and it performs much better than through kwin or whatever is used by default.
Just don't go on any manhunts yourself.