NatalSep 29, 2023

Finally had enough of Windows. I'm packing up. I'm nervous!

https://lemmy.world/post/5961010

Finally had enough of Windows. I'm packing up. I'm nervous! - Lemmy.world

Hey! Today is the day. I finally got fed up with Windows booting up with an advert that I already had yesterday and had clicked on “remind me in three days” reluctantly. I’m finally tired of killing Telemetry. Now that gaming is less important for me, I feel like now is a good time to switch mainly to Linux. I might keep a small spare drive with a Windows/Steam partition for the occasional incompatible game. I’ve just started transferring my precious files to an external drive and I’m preparing for my Exodus. Still unsure about the distro I’ll choose, I would like to avoid distro hoping. But now I made up my mind, I’m leaving windows for the foreseable future. I started self-hosting three months ago as a way to trialing Linux with the added bonus of being useful and my server is still up and alive so I’m confident I can use Linux without breaking it. Any welcoming tips? I’m a bit anxious about the big change, but also relieved I won’t have to put up with the bloat/adverts.

Show threadPuzzle_Sluts_4EverSep 29, 2023

A few aspects here

First? If you linux “correctly”, distro hopping is almost a non issue. The key is that you want as little as possible installed on your OS drive/partition. Because you have a package manager with any distro (that you should consider for a desktop) so installing software is really easy.

Aside from that: There are a lot of youtubes out there that mostly boil down to evaluating popular distros. But… the reality is that mostly you are looking at desktop environments with those. Sure you sometimes have different ideologies in what can be in a package manager (such as closed source nvidia drivers), but there are almost always workarounds for any consumer oriented desktop distro. I recommend just watching one and then realizing that KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong) and then picking a distro from there.

Personally? I mostly like (K)Ubuntu for my desktop. Most of the servers I work on for my day job are either rhel or debian so apt install is built into my brain at this point. And while I don’t like the ever increasing focus on flatpaks, I know enough to work around them when I need to and adding a new ppa is pretty trivial. And I have absolutely zero qualms about using the functional nvidia drivers so having that trivially built in is nice.

Although, funny enough: I am currently looking at other distros to maybe switch away from ubuntu. Mostly because I need to better understand exactly what the esm-apps are because right now it feels like Canonical is actively holding back package updates because they want people to pay for Pro and… fuck that noise.

Which, getting back to making distro hopping easy: My documents are already backed up to my NAS. Steam wise, I just need to copy the install library in my /data/nvme00 directory to a different drive (or redownload/reinstall). And then everything else on my OS drive is trivially replaceable and I just need to write a usb stick. … Or I use this as an excuse to buy an even bigger nvme drive and then use a usb adapter to transfer shit.

Show threadNatalSep 29, 2023

Okay so I’m slightly confused and I haven’t experimented with that on my server because it’s only one single drive. If I have several drives and partition one for the distro, the other drives as storage partitions. Are the data storage drives compatible between distro?

Would that mean that I could go pick a new distro, nuke the “distro drive”, but leave the others disk intact and just log in the new distro with my drives as they were?

Show threadaberrate_junior_beatnik (he/him)

Basically yes. You also don’t need more than one disk, you can just partition a single one.

One common way to do this is to have a separate partition for /home, so anything there will survive nuking your root partition. You can also do /var; not something I’ve done but that’s where system-wide data is kept. And finally you can use something like etckeeper to manage your system-wide config alongside whatever your distros are doing.

Sep 29, 2023 at 3:21pmWeb
Show threadNatalSep 29, 2023
Cool! And how do you proceed to switch distro then? Let’s say I have done as described above and separated the distro in its own partition. I plug a new USB distro, go through the setup and at the partitioner screen, I reassociate the new distro to where the old one was, and /home to where /home was, etc? And it just picks up that there are files there?
Show threadaberrate_junior_beatnik (he/him)Sep 30, 2023

Yep. Most installers will let you specify mount points for partitions, and it will have an option for if you want to format the partition (obviously don’t select this for /home!). So you’d have one partition for the root, and one partition for home. You’d set the mount point of the root partition to /, tell it to format that, and set the mount point of the home partition to /home, and tell it to not format that, and it’ll work as you described.

See also the other reply to my earlier comment; this is just one way, and maybe not the best way, to handle this.

Show threadPuzzle_Sluts_4EverSep 29, 2023

Personally? Unless I am going from one version of a distro to another (and even then), I have always found enough gotchas and issues with preserving /home and /var that it just never seemed worth the hassle. Much prefer to take the approach that any documents and media are backed up to a NAS (or even just google/apple/whatever drive), config files are part of a private git repo, and any development I am doing is regularly pushed anyway.

Can see the benefits for managing a lot of users (and I do get stuck doing that in my day job) but… you aren’t distro hopping under those circumstances.