My Journey into Linux Land

[kimber_ss]

So for Kali run from a flashdrive.....

Kali Linux “Live” has two options in the default boot menu which enable persistence - the preservation of data on the “Kali Live” USB drive - across reboots of “Kali Live”. This can be an extremely useful enhancement, and enables you to retain documents, collected testing results, configurations, etc., when running Kali Linux “Live” from the USB drive, even across different systems. The persistent data is stored in its own partition on the USB drive, which can also be optionally LUKS-encrypted.

To make use of the USB persistence options at boot time, you’ll need to do some additional setup on your “Kali Linux Live” USB drive; this article will show you how.

https://www.kali.org/docs/usb/usb-persistence/

I thought the whole point of dual boot with dual HDs was nothing would be saved on the other disk. You plug in the Linux drive and when in BIOS you tell the PC which disk to boot from, correct? Then once that OS is booted it doesn't see the other disk except maybe as some greyed out disk when "This PC", correct?

[SactoDoug]

My 128 GB flash drive got full fast. It has 13 GB of free space left after installing a number of apps and doing some updates. I could delete a few restore points to free up space but I am just going to take the next step instead.

I ordered a new 1 TB nvme drive. I will install Linux on it and replace the one in my laptop with it. I am going to take the old drive with Windows on it and put it in a USB enclosure. I'll boot from USB into Windows whenever I need to use it. I was surprised how cheap nvme drives are right now. I could have bought a budget one for less than $100. I ended up getting a WD 850 for $150.

[wrestlingnrj]

I've been a casual Linux (Ubuntu & Mint) user for many years and ran it off of 15 year old desktops. Recently switched out my wife and parents to Mint (Cinnamon & Mate DE's) on new SSD drives for their older computers as well because Windows just continually kept getting more and more bogged down even after clean installs. They all seem to make the switch pretty easily, especially for tech illiterate people.

I personally just picked up an Asus Zenbook14 (thank you credit card points), removed the NVMe drive with Win11 on it and swapped it out with a 1TB NVMe. Total investment $130. I put a variety of distros on some flash drives to try out live versions and ended up installing Garuda KDE dr460nized on it. Never used an Arch based distro before, but the Garuda Welcome application makes it very simple to transition from a Debian/Ubuntu based distro. Unfortunately the keyboard on my laptop would not function at all on Mint, PopOS, or KDE Neon and I was too lazy to try an external keyboard, so those did not get a fair shake.

Overall, I've been really happy with Garuda and completely blown away by the customization options KDE has (first time using it). Unfortunately I'm still stuck running Win10 in a VM because I can't seem to get the ham radio programming software I'm using to recognize my radios natively, but they connect just fine through the VM.

I've only been tinkering with Linux since 2010, but it has sure come an extremely long way in that time period especially in user friendliness. Went from weekly phone calls with my mom on fixing something on her Windows computer to zero tech calls in the past 6 months. Like others have pointed out, a very inexpensive way to test the waters is a Raspberry Pi, of which I've got a few for various purposes.

[WoodTurner]

I do more distro hopping than I should. I've ran a couple different flavors of Garuda. My favorite part about it is BTRFS and the automatic snapshots. Probably not the best choice if you're trying to keep old hardware alive but It's a great overall distro. Dragonized was definitely my preferred version of it.

[Nvberinger]

Have a poor performing W10 laptop, only a few years old and cannot be upgraded w11 due to AMD cpu. So I installed Mint, and that laptop works incredibly fast. Excellent for internet work. Whats more interesting is the slick and crisp looking user interface. Very nice.

[SactoDoug]

I installed the new Nvme drive and pulled the old one out with Windows on it. I put the old drive into a USB enclosure and tried to boot from it. Windows just kept blue screening with inaccessible_boot_device errors. That is kind of funny since it would go into a Windows recovery mode which was obviously coming from the drive which it says is inaccessible.

I guess if I want to go back to the old Windows install I will have to put the old drive back into my laptop. It is kind of strange that Linux was perfectly happy running off a USB flash drive but Windows won't run off a USB SSD enclosure.