If the laptop supports dual drives (not unheard of but not the norm) it’s way safer to dual boot from different physical drives.

Whatever OS you choose make sure they have a guide for dual-booting. Any Linux OS should be capable of dual-boot but not all will support that configuration equally.

As a failsafe I would also make a rescue USB, especially SystemRescue because of the findroot option.

Again, capable of a lot but it’s best at configuration management. I like to use Ansible after I install an OS to do things like tweak SSH to be more secure, install Fish shell, set common environment variables and aliases, create a bin folder in my home directory, and clone down a bunch of custom scripts I have and a remote Git repository. You can do this kind of thing with a bash script also but with a well written ansible playbook you can run it over and over and it can fix configuration drift (in my example it could ensure my repository of scripts is up to date).

Using it on my latest install. Not bad. I mostly picked it for the visual aspects but I’m in the fence about it’s functionality. It feels like it takes more clicks than it should to open stuff.

Ansible is a legitimate way to provision a VM, but that’s not it’s strong suit. You should look into Teraform as it’s more industry standard.

Yup

Been using it a few weeks and mostly happy. 2 gripes are waydroid not working (didn’t have a big desire to use it but still) and leaning into the immutability aspect can be tough. I say it’s tough because it didn’t take long to run into a case where I really need to use rpm-ostree install and I’ve so far failed at using workarounds.

Really. For a new user, fixing the repos is one of the less intuitive things to do.

I’d recommend dual booting right now so you can transition over a longer period. Also make sure your chosen distro supports dual-boot. Technically any distro can dual-boot but if it doesn’t support dual-boot you’ll have to put in some extra effort to make sure both can boot safely and easily.

Hoping it remains viable for a long time without updates. Syncing my KeePass database is really key for me. I need to fluidly add and read passwords from at least 3 devices.

I’m new to Gnome, been using XFCE and Budgie for the longest time. Does this or any other extension allow offsetting the location of the date and time? A webcam attached to my monitor mostly blocks it.

Wow. I might have the same model. What distro are you running?

I’m running Ubuntu Budgie Jellyfish. My biggest gripes are battery life and notifications (only low battery warning I get is the screen flickering 1 min before it dies at around 5% power), video (maybe once a month the screen will go black and I can’t do anything but hard reset), and Wi-Fi (5G connection is much more likely to drop than 2.4G if I’m between APs). Might be a bit of a lemon since I had to get the mobo replaced in like the first 2 weeks.

My Dell XPS is my most hated computer. 90% stable with Ubuntu but that 10% really stings.

Interesting project. Thanks for the share. Just saying Ansible is a more “general purpose” tool, almost a programming language, to configure most anything, not just desktop environments.

Not that it would eliminate every shell command but you should learn Ansible. This is what’s it’s built for.

Don’t know but copyright holders have demonstrated a few cases where they got AI to blatantly rip off copyrighted pictures or music.

I’m highly considering this as a daily driver. Docs need a bit more organization and not sure how big the community is but it checks a lot of boxes for me.

Usually it doesn’t solve my problems but it gives me a few places to start looking. I know some models are capable of this but to get a perfectly accurate and useful response would probably require it to recall a specific piece of input it was given and not just an “average” of the inputs.

I’d agree with this recommendation. I believe there were multiple occasions where my router assigned a dynamic IP the same as some other reserved IP. Hard as hell to diagnose. Key indicator was that roughly half the packets were being lost.

What’s your Win 11 use case? If you don’t need native performance I’d recommend Linux and BTRFS for everything and run Win11 off a VM. Dual booting is fine but I’ve personally struggled with allotting the appropriate space for each partition.

If this is legal then it’s a giant gaping loophole in the system. Not just because it’s easy to harass someone but because it sounds incredibly easy for a cop to call in an “anonymous tip” on someone they suspected of wrongdoing but had no evidence to support it. I’m almost positive the Supreme Court has even held that evidence that was gathered in the course of raiding the wrong building is legal as it’s an “honest mistake”.