Tonight I am installing Kubuntu on the gfs machine. Once she is comfortable with that, and the support ends for our version prolly going with Debian. Going to remove her windows drive (256 or 512GB) as there is only 1 m.2 port on the board, and replace it with a 1tb.
Her needs are simple, make Logitec G13 work (works and tested on my machine for months), Make ESO and addons work (Lutris has its own installer for ESO YAY! Minion has a linux version.), and minecraft java (found in app manager).
Now, she has some knock off razor mouse with buttons under the thumb, maybe the razorx software or whatever it’s called will work on her mouse?, this may be a slight pain point. I am hoping this will work out and she will be happy with her (new) pc, we are preserving her windows as a fall back if she hates it. I have a short video lined up to teach her the linux file system. She won’t be doing anything command line, for now, except to start the G13. Gonna leave her with the dolphin file manager as it is difficult to get elevated privileges compared to nautalis(sp?) where it is a simple checkbox click. Anything else to suggest here?
I can mostly teach her what she needs to know as we go, she is a smart cookie and has picked up everything I taught her for windows and networking so far so should not be an issue for her, but if you guys have any suggestions on tutorial vids for non power users or other things I can do to make this even more seamless it would be appreciated.
Yeah, simple as possible. She has 2 drives (a new 1tb m.2 and iirc a 1 or 2tb platter) and that will be the extent of partitions, I even stopped doing partitions on my systems this time around. I didn’t plan on doing a vm, now I just might, (is there a container or something ready to dl? I seem to recall reading that a bit ago. Iit has been a long time since I used a vm, is it possible to clone her active windows into a vm?) her proprietary needs are simply G13, ESO and Minecraft, the rest as you say are web based. HELL no to external repos, except the G13 one, I certainly do want it simple for her. Over the past 4 months I’ve been scrutinizing the updates before running em and have had 1 issue with FF but the rest has been a dream.
As I said I’m leaving her a rip cord in case she just doesn’t like it, I don’t see her having issues after a week of use.
Oh on the partitioning side, you probably want LVM with Btrfs on top. LVM makes expansion, migration very easy. Could even turn a single drive into raid later on without much difficulty. Btrfs gives you data integrity checksumming.
Oh yeah! Meant to do that on mine, ext4 is what I am using, but yeah she will get btrfs as timeshift suggested it when I finally activated it last month
I mean, what you really want long-term is ZFS but the setup becomes significantly less trivial and docs aren’t nearly as abundant and LVM+Btrfs gives you a good subset of the benefits. I recently converted my laptop to ZFS on root and I can now do lightning-fast backups of the system while it’s running.
oh nice, I will go down the zfs rabbit hole one day, but not today hehe thank you
Look for the massgravel github repo. Has links to Windows images and activator. If you use the IoT ones, they’re clean from all the standard Windows cruft. You can probably migrate the existing Windows install but it would be more work. Don’t have a doc on it to link.
Oh, perfect, thanks. I’ll take the easy route and check this repo out