I was at one point, was really into KDE Neon for a while and used it everywhere. Then shifted when they released a new distro away from Neon.

But now I use Debian on my two servers and looking at DietPi for my Raspberry Pi and use Linux Mint Cinnamon for my gaming PC. With the Nvidia RTX GPU I have, I had nothing but issues on any distro that used Wayland so I felt forced into this and been here since with no issues so I will be here for some time.

What you want is cloning software. You can use proprietary software like Acronis. I have used it for years but it costs.

Or you can choose free software like Clonezilla that you will flash and then boot into on a computer with the old drive and the new drive attached via an adapter. I don’t think it works if the drive is in the computer. Last time I did this a month ago, it didn’t detect the internal drive, only the drives we had attached via USB adapters.

You’ll be able to clone the old drive to the new one and even customize if you want the sizing to remain the same, relatively speaking, or let it consume the new drive naturally, which I prefer.

Once you do that, then you can move on to doing dual boot.

Be careful doing it this way though. Because dual booting by installing Windows after Linux usually requires you to reconfigure your Linux bootloader (GRUB, systemd, etc.) because Windows will override it with its own bootloader that doesn’t recognize any other OS. It’s not impossible, just annoying so most people opt to install Windows then install Linux for dual booting in that order. If you can, you might choose to install Windows on the new drive and then install Zorin afterwards and then bring over your old files and settings after the fact. That might be an easier method here than cloning.

I was really sick recently and had a persistent bloody nose after a really bad coughing spell. I decided I’d head out to the ER at around midnight. I stepped out of the bathroom and my cat was sitting there with the most horrified look on his face staring back at me. He had this strange meow I’d not heard before.

I can’t be sure, but I think he was concerned for me. I’m his entire world and there whenever he cries out. It felt nice to have him since I don’t really have anyone here with me but I felt sorry for him not knowing what’s going on and seeing me bleeding and leaving the house at such a late time of day without being able to take time to pet him and tell him I’d be back like I normally do. Thankfully it wasn’t as major as I thought and I was back in a few hours and was so glad to see him and so he’d know I’m okay.

Poor girl, I’m glad she’s with you and warming up to you! Hopefully her kittens went to good homes too.

What about a cloud option instead? I do this for stuff that I consider important but don’t want to lose. Upload to a “backup” folder and then download once you set up your next distro?

Though I wouldn’t do this with anything terribly important like my social security number or taxes or something. But stuff like a book I’m working on, game projects I have, music library, etc., general stuff I don’t want to lose.

Which driver are you using?

I was on 580 and had issues on CachyOS and Bazzite and Garuda Linux KDE Lite with an RTX 4080.

You’re right about that. This was meant for walls so probably would get nasty and gunky quick when on the floor since it wasn’t designed for that.

It makes me wonder if someone developed a special putty for this purpose though. Somehow public places like banks and government buildings keep these down and don’t had to deal with stubborn corners!

I’ve heard some people doing the water + cup method where you damp the corner with water and then leave a cup on it and it will reposition the corner to stay down. But that is only when the corner has actually come up and you want to fix it and it sounds like you want to be proactive and prevent it from coming up in the first place?

Perhaps there is some other type of adhesive you can use to keep it down but bring up when needed? My mom used to use this blue gum like substance that would hold things to the walls in her classroom. It didn’t leave residue and would come off with little ease on your part but keep things held onto the wall. That may work here? She used to get it from office supplies stores and it legit looks like gum. Can’t remember the exact name of it.

I really want to like Wayland since it seems to be the future, but I can’t when my computer keeps crashing from just using it.

I’m still new to learning the difference between Wayland and x11. What are some of the features people like between the two of them?

Debian is your most basic Cheerio cereal. Cereal in a bowl with milk and a spoon. Ready for you to eat.

Ubuntu came along and is all that plus berries, bananas, sugar, and many other toppings. They also give you a fork and knife if you want to eat using those as well as a napkin.

If you like bananas on your Cheerios and nothing else, I mean, sure you can go with Ubuntu and get bananas on your Cheerios with milk and a bowl and spoon, but many people prefer to just go with Debian and then add bananas on top on their own because they don’t want everything else that comes with it. They may not hate it, it’s just going to be a waste of food to get all that extra stuff and have to remove it after the fact.

For some people that only want bananas, they’ll go with Ubuntu because adding bananas on your cereal involves opening the banana and using a knife to cut the banana into slices. Ubuntu may use a machine to cut your bananas into perfect, equal slices, so some people want to go with Ubuntu for those reasons, whether it be because they’ve done the legwork or because they did it in a way that is the most clean method whereas you doing it ended up with you needing to redo the process 3 times and now you have little bits of excess bananas from your past failed attempts and not doing the best job cleaning it up.

TL;DR: Ubuntu took Debian and added a bunch of stuff on top of it for their users. Some people like Ubuntu because of that and it makes it easier because Ubuntu included everything whereas some people want the source Debian because they will add their own stuff on their own the manual way.

I feel like I’ll always have to make tweaks and it’ll never truly end. But I don’t say that in a bad way because I like learning and feel it’s akin to building my computer. Putting each piece together and doing the research into it helps me know better what went wrong when something breaks because I put it all together.

With the OS, because I am learning different parts of it and making all these changes, I learn so much. I have learned so much about package managers and how to use them and their flags in this in distro hopping.

But it’s no different than Windows because many of us were doing things to make the OS work for us and not against us like tweaks to use a local account or disable shit like Copilot in group policy.

Dreamcast

Same here. I’m sick of seeing people say stuff like “just pay for Premium bro”. Stfu. That’s like paying the mafia for “protection” from them. YouTube created these problems and now I have to pay them to fix it? Fuck no.

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Microsoft pushes too many bad updates for anyone to trust them to not push a bad update that bricks your system.

In the last 12 months alone, my team has had so many bad updates we’ve had to deal with. Just this month, there is an update that breaks a Microsoft product running on VMs…and yet they push the update anyway and we have to go through the process of reverting the update and doing what we can to prevent it from reapplying again.

Not to mention the forced restarts. I just restarted my machine less than a week ago. I get on the next day to find a bunch of stuff I was working on is now gone thanks to a silent update and reboot from the night before. No notifications saying “hey, we need to restart your device in 24 hours”. Just rudely interrupting whatever I’m doing and restarting with no regard for my choice.

The only good change Microsoft has made is not pushing incorrect driver updates. At least, in my experience. In the early days of Windows 8 when they started forcing updates, it continually would push a driver update for my laptop’s trackpad that broke functionality. I’d have to revert that stupid update multiple times each week and ended up giving up and just using a USB mouse instead after a while.

A bunch of vehicles are doing that and it’s so dumb. Even EV motorcycle manufacturer Zero has been doing it with stuff like heated grips.

You build it into the vehicle…but the customer can’t use it unless they pay monthly for the hardware that is already there…?

The worst of it all for the motorcycle space was a vest that is an airbag and has a subscription. So if you don’t pay your monthly subscription and crash, your airbag wouldn’t deploy. Utterly evil.

I did something like this a few years ago. Not saving someone’s life, but not reading messages and deleting my Facebook account.

I just got overloaded on it all and was going through a breakup at the time and didn’t want to keep talking to anyone. Nothing personal against anyone, I was just over it all and wanted out of Facebook, out of the addiction I felt to constantly check, and out of the privacy concerns of Facebook.

Could be a similar reason?

Also, was this Facebook or something else? Because if it was Facebook, it’s possible a privacy setting prevented the message from successfully going through.

There was this girl who was the daughter of a popular figure I knew many years ago and we lost contact over the years. I tried reaching out to her once on there and she never read the message. She was very social so I know she would have read it if she got it. But there is or was a privacy setting that could hide messages depending on how Facebook viewed a message and relationship of the two accounts. In our case, we had no mutual friends and no contact before on that account of mine and no other commonalities so Facebook hides the message in some deep place most people don’t check because it’s treated like spam or an unwanted stalker. I found some messages from random people there a few times on my account too. So maybe that happened here too?

Of course this is all assuming this is Facebook and they still have these measures in place all these years later.

No forks for Debian. Actually Debian is often used as a fork so Debian is the original, in a sense. A lot of other distros like Ubuntu have built themselves on Debian over the years. That somewhat speaks volumes to its longevity in the space and how stable it is.

The download I used is the one on their main page https://www.debian.org/ when you find the Download link in the center of the page. But if you’d like to see all of their options, you should take a look at this page https://www.debian.org/distrib/ but really it’s kind of the generic download for most, unless you need the ARM version because you’re installing on something like a Raspberry Pi or if you are using Azure, then they have a build for a virtual machine in the cloud.

Once you download the ISO from them, whether it be from a mirror or a torrent, you’ll use something like Rufus to create your live USB and that’ll let you try it out and then actually do the install. When in this live USB, you can do anything you want in it to test it and see how you like it. You can even install apps and such but just know that on next reboot, the live USB goes back to default, so it’s kind of like a computer that you can keep using indefinitely as a fresh install. It’s meant to do that so you can test it and ensure it’s what you want and works well with your system, because if that doesn’t load, then you won’t be able to install it at all. You basically get to run the entire OS off a USB flash drive and then there’s an option to actually install the OS to your computer if you feel ready to do so. Most distros go this route which is honestly a really great feature of Linux. That live USB is also good to hold onto in case anything should happen. For one, you have something that will let you run Linux off a USB in case you have like a hard drive failure and need to troubleshoot or if you ever need to reinstall Linux, you’ll have that ready to go again for you. The installation process for most distros nowadays is super simple and walks you through the entire process. It’s as easy as installing windows, and in my opinion, it’s easier and faster than installing Windows for most distros. Another good thing about Debian here is that it’s really basic and barebones. Bazzite will give you a bunch of programs right off the bat, but Debian is a pretty clean slate you’ll be working with so you don’t have a bunch of programs installed and possibly running that you’ll never use but not sure if you can remove them or not.

As far as installing stuff, you can generally do just like Windows and go to your choice program’s webpages and most will either have .deb files you can manually download and run to install your application (like Steam) or you can use the terminal’s apt (what Debian uses, other distros like Arch and Fedora may use something different) to search for and install packages too.

Personally I prefer using apt in the terminal to install my apps. It makes it much more clean and easy to manage for updates. So for searching you’ll want to use “apt search Steam” for Steam, for example. And you’ll get a list of results in the terminal results to choose from. When you find the one you feel is the one you want to use, you’ll then run “sudo apt install Steam” and if it finds duplicates it’ll prompt you which be you want or it’ll just ask you if you want to proceed or not and you enter a y or n for yes or no and the terminal takes care of the installation for you.

I generally find the app I want from the list of apt search and then copy the name exactly as shown in the list and paste when doing “sudo apt install Steam” where Steam is whatever was shown in the search results.

Sudo being the equivalent of entering your administrator credentials to do an elevated task like on Windows. Sudo isn’t needed when searching for an app name, hence why you don’t need sudo there, but sudo is required to actually install the app and its updates. You can use sudo with apt search, but it’s not necessary and might be a security risk to get used to using sudo when not necessary. So best to only use sudo when you know you need to. If an action requires it, either the app will directly tell you to run sudo or will tell you that access has been denied and that’s your tell tale sign that you need to use sudo before the command and run again.

When you want to update, you’ll run “sudo apt update” and the checks to see if you have updates available. If updates are available, it’ll generally say something like “5 updates found, run apt upgrade to perform upgrades” and you’ll then run “sudo apt upgrade” to actually perform the upgrades. This is pretty automated and it runs through everything for you after you do these. So any apps you have installed using apt will get their updates through this. Because of this, I generally will run through this once a week and see what needs updating. “Sudo apt update” and then “sudo apt upgrade”. Rarely will you run into errors but when you do, you’ll usually have clear wording in the terminal to tell you exactly why it failed or something you can put in Google to diagnose or share with a space like here to get help from others. Others may frown on me for saying this, but I’ve gotten a lot of help from LLMs with this stuff too. Granted you have to know some of it beforehand to know when the LLM is giving you good, helpful information and not something incorrect, but it’s been a help for me, personally, when troubleshooting arises.

If you make a mistake and install the wrong app or change your mind and no longer want it, uninstallation is as easy as “sudo apt remove steam” and following the prompts thereafter.

Some may recommend you do stuff like “sudo apt install steam -y” where the -y flag is to tell the command “if prompted for y or n, enter y” so you really automate the process for yourself. But I honestly don’t recommend that for people new to Linux because it’s better to know what you’re doing and read the prompts in the terminal and when you feel confident, then try some of those flags like that. It is one of the bad things about LLMs, because a lot of them will give you commands like that to run and it’s honestly better to not use flags until you’re sure of what you’re doing and what you want.

Honestly, if you’re familiar with docker containers and yaml files, it’s pretty much the same on Linux.

I manage my docker directly from the terminal. You’ll want to first install docker using “apt search docker” and then using commands to build my yaml and then compose within docker. But you can also use a variety of programs available to manage docker in a GUI, which is an app that has a graphical interface much like what most apps on Windows do if you’re more comfortable going that route.

Since you’ve already been using it and got some yamls made, you might be able to just directly transfer them over into your Linux build, whichever distro you end up going with and once you get docker installed and set up.

My setup is a lot like yours using the same apps. And I actually use Bazzite for my gaming PC.

But I would NOT recommend it for use as a server. It’s a cool distro and gets the job done for gaming. But not suitable for server needs. Also for another reason, Bazzite is immutable which means that it’s not really built to be customizable like other distros. That’s great for ensuring you don’t mess stuff up too bad, but not great for learning and for homelab stuff. You’ll want more customization and the ability to make the OS yours as you find yourself needing to make all kinds of changes as you find new stuff to deploy to it.

Like the other person said here, go with something like Debian. That’s what I am using for my server with the same apps you use.

As a beginner, you’ll find a lot of the guides online for setting up and troubleshooting will often favor Debian and it’ll be easier to do.

Bazzite doesn’t have the same convenience which you will love to have as a beginner learning the Linux space.

If you want to try out some distros, my recommendation is to get yourself a laptop that’s from within the last 5-7 years and you can load up all the different distros on there to get them a test. It’s how I do mine. I got a laptop from work they were going to e-waste and been using it exclusively for Linux for the past 2 years and tried tons of distros on it since.

A lot of people running homelabs choose Debian because it’s like you said. Easy on updates and not prone to shutting down or needing a lot of maintenance and troubleshooting. It just works.

Also, you’ll find that nearly any Linux distro nowadays doesn’t require reboots after updates. I still do them on occasion, but it’s really not necessary and the OS won’t nag you or reboot on its own. I had that frustration with Windows tons of times. Left the house and went to the gym to discover my Windows server rebooted itself that day with zero warning and now I can’t enjoy Plex or my streaming music. That happened to me a couple of times. I have never had that happen with Linux since switching. Only did when we had a power outage, but now I have a UPS and set the computer to auto start when it detects power so that won’t be an issue anymore even after an outage.

Also, if you’re not already doing it, consider using a container like Docker or Podman for your hosted apps. It’s working wonders for me and everything is much easier to control here. It’s also just a great learning experience overall. Management of your apps becomes a lot easier and keeping things contained. My only regret is that I wish I would have started using Docker when I switched to Linux, but the switch after wasn’t too bad. I just had some cleanup to do of the standalone services in transferring to Docker.