lurch (he/him)

if you still have multi boot, i would suggest using clonezilla to put images of everything onto an external HD.

if you just have linux, the easiest way is to keep an installation medium, get a big USB stick (or external HD) and tar everything on to it. tar has a test mode, a diff mode and incremental mode, so you can make sure it has everything. you can also exclude things like snaps (they appear twice when installed, so no need to backup both). to restore, you would use the installation medium to fix partitions if necessary, then extract everything and maybe chroot into it and fix the boot loader.

you should make backups, so you can enjoy being less nervous

you could move the flatpak stuff onto another partition with same permissions and bind mount it to the original location, then persist it with a line in fstab

root can always access them. it’s exactly for solving these kind of maintainance and repair tasks.

btw don’t forget to make backups. repairing things can go sideways.

I think Ubuntu is very good, if you want quick and easy. It’s incedibly painless.

However, it does forced auto updates by default. They are called unattended-upgrades and run in the background by default. You can pause or disable them though. Also snaps auto update silently, by default. That can also be paused, though.

What really sucks is, if you don’t have a printer it continues to try and install cups, which can be a security concern. However, I successfully blocked it by creating an immutable file where it would put the snap, while it was uninstalled.

the command ss shows connections

if they’re all already hard linked into the human folder, why rename them

use a mixer application (there are a lot) and check the levels and if maybe a gain boost is activated (not all hardware has it)

just make sure you have backups and stuff like this doesn’t matter

also, you should make backups and have a restore strategy that covers cases like this.

you can boot from a liveCD or USB, then mount the main OS, bind mount dev and proc, chroot into it and reconfigure/reinstall the boot loader

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VMs can be slow AF tho. Also, they use up a lot of disk space and RAM, because you have a whole ectra OS in there. But yeah, a lot of proprietary things work better in VMs with their native OS.

things that differ between distros, because everyone thinks they can do it better than others: multimedia and sound, firewall config, service management, different init systems, switching default when multiple packages provide the same feature and are installed in parallel, config file migration during updates, making and installing your own custom kernel, selection of free games available.

a bootable removable medium that can display and chainload all the installed OSes

No idea. The USB should be in there. Can you look onto the USB from Windows? (but don’t change anything on it) Maybe the port doesn’t work properly.

You should try enabling the options in:

• Startup>Boot>Boot device List F12 Option (most important)
• Config>USB (may be only for charging, but may also help)
• Security>I/O Port Access>USB Port (may be only for keyboard/mouse, but not clear)

and disable:

• Startup>Boot>Boot Order Lock (imporrant)

then Restart>Exit Saving Changes and press F12 furiously during next boot (as i don’t know when exactly) and select USB.

source: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html

did you try and press F1 at the logo screen after power on and adjust settings in the UEFI BIOS Config, Security and Startup menus?

This doubles as a guide for average bread length.

what i don’t like about most tiling WMs is they are keyboard only. you can’t hold a beverage in one hand and use them easily with the mouse. only very few let you also do most things with mouse (notion for example). currently i use Gnome (mutter standard WM) with the Forge extension (that adds tiling) for that reason. It’s not perfect, but lets me use my phone with one hand and operate the PC with the other etc.