Endeavour is great, I daily it and as a Linux noob it’s been very forgiving. My only annoyance is that I’ve been having some issues with the display where sometimes I’ll wake it up and will only get a black screen and no means of doing anything to fix it. My laptop also really doesn’t like me using any other DEs besides Budgie.

Dumb libruls think global warming is real, when 6 months out of 2024 are not yet breaking temperature records! Half the year is not even hotter!

Doesn’t affect me since I’m on EndeavourOS and they discontinued ARM support anyway!

I’m downvoting this comment specifically because you decided that you had to make your long comment in a larger font just to stand out from the crowd. Very spammy, dude. I’m sure your opinions are just as worth reading without you having to put flashing lights on them.

Just tell her to get gud and start using ViM for everything

Don’t worry friend, I recognize that Ubuntu is not quite as far into the ethical FOSS universe as some other distros but at the very least it’s a soft landing for an uninformed new user. I plan on using it long enough to get my sea legs and use my backup PC to test other platforms.

I don’t get this kinds of comments.

Yeah, I’ve never understood people making poorly written snide comments with absolutely zero clarification, either.

professional software

I use what I want and I’m happy with the pickings. I mostly use word processors for journaling and note taking, and the professional software I use (music notation and DAWS) work just fine for my purposes. I say, if I’m content with what I’m using, why do you have to be an ass about it? I don’t care what you use and I wouldn’t land in the comments just to put you on blast for your personal choices.

Oh man no kidding! I’m using a relatively slow, large Linux OS (Ubuntu) and even it is snappy as hell compared to W10.

As a recent convert, I completely love the idea of “One week of Linux” posts or reserving switch over stories to weekly posts or something. FOSS Fridays?

It’s always a heartwarming experience seeing someone passionate about a subject enough that they’d be willing to dedicate what was likely at least twenty minutes of their own free time to writing a detailed response to a stranger on the internet.

re: /dev/sda haberdashery

Your explanation was very helpful in explaining the process by which the BIOS is loaded. As I’ve continued to work on Ubuntu, I’ve been trying to hammer out little errors along the way and I believe that I inadvertently identified the problem with my dual-booting situation before. Whenever I load Linux, the system will load that ubiquitous screen where it does a filesystem check, etc, and I always get two errors: (1) VMX (outside TXT) disabled…; (2) ima: error communicating with TPM. I went into the BIOS and figured out how to turn the TPM on, and when I did so… what do you know, I started boot-looping again, just as before. Apparently I’m going to have to do a bit of troubleshooting to get Linux operable with the TPM, if I care enough about it to just undo a simple error message on boot-up that has no impact on my actual computing experience. But having his TPM chip before was causing boot-looping, perhaps due to a security issue with grubx, who knows, but for the time being I’m putting it on the back-burner.

re: Musescore

I appreciate the thought, and yes Musescore has been on my periphery a good percentage of my 15 years of using notation software. Musescore is an admirable project and I’m impressed with the steps its taken in the last few updates. Frankly, this has probably been the fourth or fifth time now that someone has hocked Musescore as a FOSS alternative to Finale, and while I get it, they are not truly one-to-one in compatibility, at least not yet. Finale is a boutique program, designed for professional use and it’s very feature-rich, especially as one gets into more specialized concerns in terms of unusual notations, etc. Finale works just fine on my system and I don’t intend on changing away from it anytime soon. I’ve been using it for so many years, it’s like second-nature to me. I couldn’t imagine dropping a software I spent hundreds of dollars on now for something else if I still get great mileage out of it.

re: Arch Linux

Following the last time you and I communicated, I actually saw a video from SomeOrdinaryGamers where Muta did a step-by-step installation of Arch on a new machine. It certainly seems more complex than Ubuntu, but at the same time, boy does it give you a rich experience in learning the intricacies of your system and how everything functions together. I am definitely going to be keeping Ubuntu on my main system for the time being, but I do have a blank ZBook15 gen 2 (I believe it has Mint on it right now? I haven’t opened it in a few months…) and I might have a go at installing Arch on it and messing around for a while.

My current project is going to be taking my secondary HDD, which is only a storage device now, and configuring its file structure to be easier to use with Linux, as well as clearing out all the legacy OS files from when it used to have Windows on it. I’ve been having trouble using utilities like rm -rf because for some reason, some files will delete with no issue, but then others will actually cause the drive to crash in some spectacular fashion, and I have to sudo umount -l then remount again with ntfs-3g just to get back to it. I can’t tell if its a permissions issue or something else. I know the drive is old and there are four damaged sectors, but the most recent SMART test didn’t seem to throw up any major red flags. I can delete individual problem files, but trying to delete a bulk quantity runs into issues at times. It’s weird. I don’t exactly want to format the drive because there’s ~0.9TB of personal files on there (that are all backed up both on a cloud service and an external SSD, no worries!), but so far I’m having fun learning some new commands.

I refer back to my previous comment

Yes, I am aware of how the partition naming structure works, to a degree. I am going off the fact that when I installed Ubuntu, it was installed on a partition (sda2) rather than a primary drive (sda). I’ve read that when GRUB is installed, if it gets installed to /dev/sda2 rather than /dev/sda it can cause issues with dual booting as the BIOS will read in a sequential order, and it may miss a partition if it’s “far enough down the list”. As another example, you may be in for some trouble if grubx.efi is installed on /dev/sda8 or something.

Everything gets installed into a partition on a drive.

I guess I must have gotten my preconceptions wrong, or perhaps I misread something. From my impression, certain things can be installed on the primary drive such as boot loaders, but I could be wrong.

If you don’t mind me asking, what software are you wanting/needing to use?

Finale 2012c is the main software I needed. And by funnies I mostly just mean that it’s slow to update graphics, but the program works entirely as intended. MIDI drivers work, sound libraries (Garritan and ARIA Player) function, print to PDF is fine, I’m actually incredibly impressed! I’m using WINE 8.0.1.

I also wouldn’t mind trying to get Cakewalk running, as my workflow is definitely more attuned to that software, but maybe trying to get all the proprietary drivers (e.g. TASCAM’s interface drivers) to work with Linux may be more headache than its worth.

Arch

I’ve heard it can be pretty challenging to get into Arch, is this true? I don’t know if I’ll ever be a “script kiddie” as it were. I plan on getting good at using bash and learning the other ones like ssh, but I don’t know how much I like the idea of having to hand-craft my OS from bare metal.

Thank you for the breakdown. I’ve learned a fair bit about the infrastructure of my computer and Linux since posting this, and I’m now dedicated Ubuntu with only needing to do some very minor work with WINE here and there in the last two weeks or so. Linux has been a blast and learning about everything has been a lot of fun so far.

My problem turned out to be something with the BIOS. I don’t know if a switch got flipped somewhere along the way or what, but when I reset the BIOS to factory default settings in the boot menu I no longer had issues with boot looping and a CPU I could fry an egg on.

I do believe that GRUB was initially installed on sda2 and not sda, and Windows was just taking precidence over grubx64.efi upon startup. Now that I’ve scrubbed windows from my PC I no longer have any issues booting up and my PC seems to run just about the same as before, less a few graphical funnies with some larger proprietary software I use.

Funny enough, I tried to do a clean install of Debian with KDE on my system and I went back to having boot issues, mainly where it would just open to GRUB CL and I couldn’t get it to initialize Debian, when I was certain it was a good install. So I’m just going to stick to Ubuntu for a good while and learn it. Once I feel very confident in filesystem maintenance, command line navigation, snap/flatpak/.deb/whatever, all the major things, I’ll start shopping around for another distro again. Ubuntu has been treating me very nicely though.

Hrm, I’m not sure how you are going about your installation procedure. You mentioned that you are installing Ubuntu, but Ubuntu should come with Grub pre packaged. Installing Ubuntu really only requires clicking a couple buttons in the install wizard.

I had Linux installed on a tertiary partition of a secondary drive, my F: drive. I neglected to store it within the dedicated SSD, C:, and I believe that GRUB was just not being picked up because instead of being sda or something close to it, it was instead sda6.

Further this with the fact that GRUB seemed to not have elevated permissions and when I eventually got into its command line, it was not able to run Linux for reasons I’m unaware. Windows BIOS menu never had Linux or any corollary term available as a boot order item, and only through digging through the Boot from EFI item and submenus was I able to find anything to actually boot Ubuntu without live CD at all. grubx.efi (or whatever it was called) black screened.

Im not really familiar with shim, but, from what I understand, it’s the loader for when you have secure boot enabled, but you should have that disabled.

Scout’s honor, I really did disable Secure Boot. I did so through Shell. I did so in the Windows directory. I even triple checked that it was disabled through the BIOS menu. If shimx64.efi is only supposed to work when Secure Boot is disabled, that must be because Windows has just been acting screwy as all get out.

Thanks! I’ll be sure to use that.

I am going with this game plan, courtesy of ChatGPT 4. It aligns very nicely with my goals and the steps involved also seem to coincide nicely with the suggestions made in this thread. Gives me a path forward, which is really what I need now.

1. Backup Personal Files:

   • Access your Linux partition (A:).
   • Mount the Windows SSD (C:) and HDD (F:) within Linux.
   • Carefully check for any personal files on C: and copy them to F:. Verify that all important data is on F:.

2. Create a Full Backup of F:

   • Connect an external storage device with sufficient space.
   • Create a full backup of your HDD (F:) to this external device. This is crucial to prevent data loss.

3. Verify Backup Integrity:

   • Ensure that the backup on the external storage is complete and the files are accessible.

4. Prepare for OS Installation:

   • Download the latest Linux Cinnamon 23.10 ISO.
   • Create a bootable USB drive with this ISO using a tool like Rufus or Etcher.

5. Remove HDD:

   • Power down your PC.
   • Physically remove the HDD (F:) to ensure it remains untouched during the OS installation.

6. Boot from Linux USB Drive:

   • Insert the bootable Linux USB drive.
   • Access BIOS/UEFI and set the USB drive as the primary boot device.

7. Install Linux Cinnamon on SSD:

   • Proceed with the Linux installation on the SSD (formerly C:).
   • During installation, select the option to format and use the entire SSD. This will erase Windows 10 and all data on it.

8. Post-Installation Checks:

   • After installation, boot into Linux Cinnamon.
   • Check that all hardware components are recognized and functioning.

9. Reinstall HDD:

   • Power down your PC.
   • Reinstall the HDD (F:).

10. Mount and Access HDD in Linux:

    • Boot into Linux.
    • Mount the HDD (F:). You may need to install additional drivers or file system utilities depending on its format.

11. Data Restoration or Access:

    • If required, restore the personal files from the external backup to HDD (F:).
    • Alternatively, if the HDD is accessible without issues, use it as is for storage.

12. Install Necessary Software:

    • Install any Linux-compatible software that you need.

13. Final System Checks:

    • Ensure everything is working as expected.
    • Make any necessary adjustments in system settings, drivers, or configurations.

14. Create a New System Backup:

    • Once everything is set up, consider creating a new system image backup.

You are correct. Thank you for giving some options for processing on this path. I’m still deciding whether I want to continue trying the dual boot route, figuring out how to get VMX running, or just maining Linux and dealing with the learning curve. I do feel that my end plan, however long that would be, is to be using Linux as my primary OS anyway and there’s no time like the present, but for all I know after sleeping on it I may decide that I still want a functional Windows in my laptop.

Dedicated SSD (C:) has Windows on it.

Internal HDD has F: (storage) and a partition for Ubuntu, which is the A: drive in Windows and /dev/sda3 in Linux.

I was originally hoping to do it this way and be able to dual boot them, but the more I think about it the more I feel that just going straight to Linux and biting the bullet would be better in the long run, and I can flash Windows if I really need it.

I was trying to get GRUB to act as boot loader but for the longest time I couldn’t even get GRUB running, even with at least 5 different troubleshooting ideas. Then once it was running, I still couldn’t get it to mount the EFI. Then I started getting the boot loop issues and Windows OS stopped working, but I figured out how to get Linux desktop running via shimx64.efi in the BIOS boot loader.

This computer is natively a Win 10 machine, and I was trying to add Linux to it.

I’ll have to spend some time backing up and moving some files around but I think this is how I’ll move forward. I think I’ll also find a cracked Win10 image and I’ll keep it on a thumb drive if ever i need to full on run the OS. I use a few proprietary software that universally get the JUST USE FOSS ALTERNATIVES argument from people not in the know.

Thanks for the no-nonsense reply. I have been smelling a little bit of bullremoved with the whole dual boot fiasco here for a bit. VMX not behaving, Windows’ VM utility not behaving, BIOS not behaving, it’s like goddamn if I type a command I wouldn’t mind if it stuck instead of seemingly getting thrown into a black hole.

Going with your approach, I imagine if I pick a home distro and decide I want to move to another down the line the transition is far easier than this? Even if I am switching from say Ubuntu to Fedora?

I turned it off a while back.

I’m considering other options though I’ve enough Ubuntu so far. Fedora also looks nice. I’m a complete GNU/Linux novice but I can generally work around technical sides of programs relatively fine. I’m not sure why this issue is kicking my ass so much lol