I ordered a laptop (five years ago) that had Ubuntu/Gnome preinstalled, but soon replaced it with Debian/Mate, mainly because of what I read about it on Distrowatch. My new laptop (one year old) shipped bare metal and runs Fedora/Cinnamon.
Fedora 6 back in 2007-8 as a part of my CompTIA A+ training. It wasn’t required but my instructor wanted some of us more advanced students to experience a life outside of Windows.
I first installed mint on a pc, but only for homebridge. First distro I really used was openSuse tumbleweed and after that I shortly switched to Arch because I liked the way the AUR work (using yay) better, than the community repos of openSuse.
I still recommend openSuse TW to anyone that wants to try a rolling release distro. You don’t even need the Terminal in that distro.
I started with trying distros in live mode out of general curiosity. My machine had a ton of data and didn’t support dualbooting so I didn’t want to install something. Then my Windows license broke and I decided that pirating is not great so I wanted to install a distro. I liked Manjaro the most(I know I know but hey back then I didn’t know about its issues) but couldn’t install it because of a wrong boot device mode (lol I was an absolute noob then). So I flashed KDE Neon and installed it after finally figuring out the BIOS/UEFI stuff (was too lazy to reflash Manjaro lol). It wasn’t much of a conscious choice. I just installed one of the KDE distros I liked pretty much the same after I couldn’t install Manjaro but that probably saved me a few hours of troubleshooting so that’s good. KDE was a requirement though. I did want a Windows-looking distro so my older family members could use it. After that I tried many distros. Now I’m on Cachy just because of the significantly smoother experience (optimization rules!). It’s unstable though so I don’t recommend it
KDE can’t get away with “user at risk” for a DE designed for general purpose users. That means users who aren’t technically minded or linux experts. Maybe hyprland and i3 can tell users to RTFM but an embedded store distributed with ALL KDE versions should have some sensible design decisions such as “maybe dont allow arbitrary JS execution as root within a feature people don’t expect to be doing more than changing the background pic and some fonts”
Ubuntu, I think. This was around 2010, when I was just ten years old. Back then, we had Unity as the main desktop. Left Linux and settled with Windows for some time. Tried to move back to Linux in 2020, starting with Fedora 30. Then I tried around other distros, but still stuck around with Fedora. Moved to NixOS after the RedHat fiasco. My main laptop died, so I’m using my dad’s crappy outdated laptop with Guix + Nix.
Your model has no GPU, so it’s possible that no graphical environment is supported. I suggest you sell it and get a Raspberry Pi if what you’re after is a more desktop experience.
It was not too hard if you are already familiar with Nix. The features supported (and the custom Linux kernel) can be found in surface-linux. For NixOS I used the nix-hardware flake to simplify things.
The worst part was the compilation of the Linux kernel, that took hours on the surface. Eventually, I used the remote nix build feature to compile on a more capable computer.
mdadm is the tool you can use to create and manage software RAIDs on Linux. You can also manage them with Cockpit.
If you do go with mdadm, my advice is create a partition on each drive that is slightly smaller than the drive itself, and use that as the device in mdadm. That way if you need to replace a drive, and the new one is a few MBs/GBs smaller, you’ll still be able to use it.
Lvm could be the way to go. Start with the minimum amount of partitions (i.e. / and /boot and swap as lv, maybe efi as a real partition). Add additional lv later if/ when you need them. You can always re-size a partition and the wrapping lv when you want to re- distribute storage-space.
I never needed more than these partitions. But that is just my use case.
Edit: oh. Missed the Multi boot point. Forget what I wrote. :)
Just a reboot. There’s an EFI menu listing all the available images - I keep a couple of old ones around to roll back to in case of problems - and I just select the one I want.
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