Try F1 instead of F12. It should be under Setup -> Boot, and then just make your USB the first entry, save, and exit. And just so we’re covering all bases, the usb should be plugged in before you reboot into the bios settings and it may be under a name that doesn’t say “usb” anywhere (for example, the name of my usb in the bios settings contains the manufacturer and size in GB in addition to some other nonsense that i think is a model number).

i dunno why you gotta call me out like that…

I will keep it there for future historians.

great, now i have spit coffee all over the place. thanks for the laugh!

Somewhere around 20:1

Hmm. So far, i’ve only been considering tiling-is-the-default solutions, but maybe you’re on to something. If I can get my fancy keyboard combos to do tiling stuff just how i like it, there’s no reason why that has to be the default mode of operation…

This is what i use on my work computer! Could it be that the answer was right under my nose this whole time? Still needs some work to get it mouse-friendly enough for him. I guess i could throw gnome-panel and some other niceties on there, though…

As long as i can make my keybinding changes in a text file that i can throw in my dotfiles repo, i’m ok with a bit of tinkering. i like configuring stuff, but only once lol. Openbox sounds like it ticks a lot of my boxes.

If I do go with a DE+alternative WM instead, i’m leaning towards xfce rather than kde, since (as i understand it) xfce is a bit more lightweight. The laptop is getting old, and the hardware wasn’t anything to write home about even when it was new, so any extra performance i can squeeze out of the thing is a plus.

This sounds promising. I think he’d appreciate having the out-of-the-box niceties of a DE, too.

Absolutely. I did not mean to imply that small daily-life changes are all that is necessary, just that we shouldn’t count them as useless just because they are small impact. At the very least, it is a tool i use to keep climate-change-induced depression and anxiety at bay enough to make “real action” something i’m mentally capable of.

Yes, but making changes in my own life (as small as they may be in the grand scheme of things) helps me feel a little less depressed about the whole thing. So many of the most impactful changes are outside of my control. Yes, i can, to some extent, make my voice heard and push for policy changes, and I can refuse, to some extent, to purchase from or invest in companies that are the biggest polluters and carbon-users. But I’m not a CEO of a multinational oil and gas conglomerate, nor am I in charge of making policy decisions for the country (hell, I live in a very red state, so my vote essentially doesn’t count, outside of local elections).

But I do have the power to set an example. It is always good to make changes that you can, even if it’s comparitively negligible. I think if everyone made the effort to live more sustainably, the people that actually have the power to make big changes may feel more pressure to do something (people asking “if i can do it, why can’t they” when voting or making purchases or investments could have a big effect if we all did it together). It would also help show the greenwashing that a lot of companies engage in as a facade (people that actually know what it takes to reduce their carbon footprint would be more aware of what does and doesn’t have an impact). Possibly… Maybe we’re all screwed and there’s nothing we can do about it and civilization as we know it will come crashing down around us. But I think hope is a good thing to hold on to in the meantime, and doing what I can in my own life gives me hope.

I’ve never had an issue, outside of bios updates (see last paragraph). I’ve even booted into windows after hibernating in linux (but not the other way around, since I don’t let windows hibernate; not saying you can’t, just that I don’t), and everything was fine when i got back. I use a swap partition for hibernating, in case you’re curious.

I do try to make sure I’m watching when it reboots after a windows update (because linux is my default, so i have to select windows from the boot loader) just in case, but i’ve also removeded that up a time or two with no ill effects.

My one piece of advice is: once you get it working, take a picture of your bios settings. You may have to fix some settinga after bios updates, as they can get set back to the default values. I did not do this, and while it led to a very confusing afternoon due to my inexperience, it would have been a non-issue if I’d have taken some pictures and known to look at them.