Brainstorming, preparing for new laptop

[DoYouKubuntu]

Not sure if relevant anymore on this topic, but I can say, as far as using bootable USB media, I recently stumbled on the below little tool. Works great and boots from ISO instead of having to 'dd' them or anything else.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Thanks for the info, MoonRise! I still haven't decided how I'm going to install K on the new laptop. I'll take a look!

[GreyGeek]

Not sure if relevant anymore on this topic, but I can say, as far as using bootable USB media, I recently stumbled on the below little tool. Works great and boots from ISO instead of having to 'dd' them or anything else.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

I've got perhaps a dozen ISO's from various distro on my 695GB rust bucket and I used it today to save my bacon when Manjaro barfed a lung on me.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I've got perhaps a dozen ISO's from various distro on my 695GB rust bucket and I used it today to save my bacon when Manjaro barfed a lung on me.

Oh no! What happened, GG?!

[GreyGeek]

I resized my Neon BTRFS partition from 465Gb to 405GB and then shrunk the partition. Then I created another partition out of that 60GB and installed Manjaro on it.
Since my Neon was on sda1 and the boot was installed on sda, I installed Manjaro to sda3 and boot on sda as well. I expected Manjaro to see the existing grub and add itself to it. It didn't. It behaved like Windows. I expected to be able to destroy the sda3 partition and and use the partition manager to expand the sda2 partition to take up the 60GB. Having done that I rebooted and got an error about grub being a special Arch file, which Neon couldn't read, and then a msg about not finding a kernel just before Its grub_rescue> prompt, which had no commands of any sort.

I booted into Neon on Ventoy and used install-mbr to add mbr to the first 512 bytes. Then I replaced @ with my last Neon snapshot and rebooted.
After I rebooted, I got the BSOD at the login window, which never showed the login screen. My nvidia driver never loaded. After several retries, including doing a fresh install of Neon to the bare SSD, I kept getting the BSOD. The SSD formatting was hosed.

So, I used dd to wipe the entire SSD with zeros. And started over with a fresh install. Instead of using my btrfs script I installed TimeShift and made a couple of snapshots.
A little while later I created a second snapshot and told TimeShift to rollback to the first snapshot. It wouldn't boot up.
I did another fresh install and repeated my manual recovery process. After I used mc to copy @home/jerry into @/home/jerry I deleted the line in fstab that loaded @home to /home. So now I am back to using my snapshot script and the results of which I am using right now. It wasn't as much work or take as much time as it appears, since I could restore my home account files with a simple copy command using mc. Copying from one SSD to another is blazing FAST!.

Manjaro? Change everything back to Breeze light (which is what I use) and it would be hard to tell the difference between Manjaro and Kubuntu or Neon.
The systemd-analyze time was 5.8sec. My time, runnin Nvidia, is

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.094s (kernel) + 1.417s (userspace) = 4.512s
graphical.target reached after 1.392s in userspace

Not too shabby.
I only moved to Neon to get a little closer to the leading (not the bleeding) edge and I like what I am getting. As a rolling release I will keep it rolling along.

[MoonRise]

So far, I've played wit Ventoy on a lot of system types. It's been a great tool to use to review different Distros. Most I reviewed were KDE or XFCE based. Mostly cosmetic in look.

Anyway, hope your path goes well DYK!

[pwabrahams]

WARNING!!! If you already have a Dropbox account and are installing Dropbox on a new machine, be very careful. If you don't do it right, you'll induce a full sync that will have the effect of bringing in a lot of ancient stuff that you really don't want cluttering up your machine. You need to start with a selective sync. I don't know the best way to achieve that, though.

[Snowhog]

DoYouKubuntu Is this thread relevant anymore? Can I close it?

[DoYouKubuntu]

DoYouKubuntu Is this thread relevant anymore? Can I close it?

Feel free to close it, Snowhog! It's all good now. Thanks.