CZ and dd and other “it’s 1998” tools copy the entire disk. like, you clone a 500 GB SSD with 50 GB used to another disk, guess how much data gets copied? correctomundo, the entire 500 gigs. that’s not super-healthy for the new drive and it recreates the same volume UUIDs on the target disk as the source drive, so you’re left with a mess if you keep both drives in a system.

you have a modern tool at your disposal, the mentioned btrfs send subvol | btrfs receive subvol that copies only what’s used. GRUB (you can use this opportunity to switch to systemd-boot) won’t pick up shit, you need to install it to the new drive (and remove it from the old one).

eons ago, macOS had the SuperDuper! tool, a free utility that clones the entire disk, resizing the partition in the process and copies only the data and it does that from within the OS, no booting off USB installers and such. sad to say, nothing close exists over here, you’ll just have to get good at doing things manually.

look up btrfs send and receive. you’ll be copying data from the old disk to the new. prior to that you create the same layout on the new disk (efi, boot, btrfs with LUKS, subvolumes root and home). sadly, there aren’t any readymade solutions that do this for you. big time NO on clonezilla and friends.

Vista. Tried to make Ubuntu work for a while but that was a shit show back then… Moved over to OS X and I was home - a beautiful UNIX where everything just worked. Stayed there for close to a decade (Lion-Mavericks-El Capitan-High Sierra-Mojave), mostly on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly, the iOS-ization ramped up so I had to rip tons of iCloud related stuff everytime I did a fresh install and then Catalina killed off 32-bit apps and brought other irritants, so I tried Fedora 35 and escaped with close to no issues.

And here I am, on Fedora 40 five years later.

thinkpads are interesting because they are heavy-duty machines that can be had for cheap on the used market. they are cheap because businesses buy them by the truckload and then offload them after three+ years and switch to Newest & Best. flooded market plus a buncha older models still around from earlier floods plus civilians selling their shit -> low price, otherwise nobody would buy them.

if you haven’t got access to such a market, either by being around where they’re being dumped directly or by having local businesses importing them in bulk and reselling them locally, then you should look elsewhere for value, as they’re only interesting if they can be had for cheap.

e.g. you have similar options from hp (elitebook) and dell (latitude), they are also business-class laptops with durability and serviceability in mind, perhaps you can find those locally.

as an aside, you should skip all AMD platforms up until 5000 series; many issues (power management, GPU performance, etc.) especially if you’re going to run linux.

first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

looking for “privacy issues” in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that’s the only issue preventing you from eating it.

you’re being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it’s “off”, so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?

wish they would say what the “old intel CPU” refers to and which ate the modern ones that don’t need the hack.

I have no idea what this challenge is (I automatically assume it’s some cringe when I read “challenge” also that pic is… what?), but you don’t run Mint/Debian/Ubuntu if you have super-fresh hardware, like AMD 7000-series or Intel 14th gen and so on. in that case you have to go with Fedora or one of its derivatives (Nobara, Bazzite, etc.), because they have the newest kernels that allow this hardware to run OOB.

if you have a bit older hardware (like 2-3 years old), Mint or Debian is your best bet; Ubuntu if you have to, and only as a stepping stone. it’s a solid base and if you use flatpak for everything (Firefox, Chrome, Lutris, Steam, etc.) you won’t have issues with old packages and you’ll get the best of both worlds - stability and supported hardware.

what’s this “probability” based on?

wine exposes the user’s home directory as drive Z: and has full read/write access to it. so, the user’s proper fucked.

edit: I misspoke, Z: exposes the entire root file system, whereas only the /home/user/ has full r/w access.

oh, you can get away with a 350 W PSU if it’s a good one, like one from a reputable brand. I was mentioning shitty 500 W PSUs as those are ubiquitous practically everywhere and cost next to nothing.

you’ll see if you’re ready to rock when you first turn it on, most of the GPUs have a LED near the power connector. if the PSU is adequate, the light is white. if it isn’t, it’s red.

those are insane prices, I’m very sorry you’re in this position. almost everywhere else in the world, prices are driven down by people upgrading to current tech, like the 7000 series, which thne pushes down used 6000-series which then pushes down used 5000-series and so on, and also there being a plethora of old cards used for mining in the olden days that nobody wants to buy.

apologies for possibly misleading OP, although they didn’t explicitly ask for it.

anyhow, old versions still work for some use cases, with some tweaks being necessary.

unless you’re getting those for free, skip them both and get a RX 570. those can be had in the $50 range. it’s a dramatically better GPU, and it can run off the shittiest 500W PSUs.

as to linux, it’s hella supported in practically every regard, including overclocking and ROCm.

you need a swap file, a swap subvolume, or a swap partition that’s RAM + 50%, on account of zram. then you need systemd scripts that disable zram and enable swap on suspend and do the reverse on resume. also, you need some selinux tuning to allow you to write to said file. you have a detailed howto in Fedora Magazine.

stop using bullshitgpt.

edit: here’s the article.

deleted by creator

btrfs with subvolumes. I have fedora gnome, fedora kde, debian 12 kde, arch mate as subvolumes on the same disk and of course a home subvolume that they all mount on boot, so all my data is always available.

OK, so what this purports to do is use your email server as chat platform. kinda intriguing, could have several use cases, don’t know what it does with existing email or how the chat looks like in e.g. thunderbird…

unfortunately, after installing it and being unsuccessful about having it login to my IMAP account (works fine with thunderbird), I’ve given up.

so, the “onboarding” is less than stellar and the desktop app is electron, which I hate; haven’t tried the android app.

edit: it works, the initial login process just takes super long; guess it’s trying different ports and stuff to be auto-magical. works fine for intra-server comms (accounts belonging to same domain), adding secondary device works (android, from f-droid). comms (encrypted) are stored in a separate IMAP folder that’s unreadable to “normal” mail clients, so it doesn’t disturb e.g. thunderbird. a fine array of customizations in the apps, will be testing it further.

someone needs to rewrite this, both the post here and the promo copy on the website, it’s hella confusing and explains nada.

yeah, I wanted a board from a busted laptop and then transplant it along with the battery - plenty room inside.

then, all you’d need is a display controller that attaches to the motherboard’s HDMI and drives the display, those are like $20 on aliexpress. everything else is USB and can easily be soldered to USB connectors; the later unibodies would be way more difficult in that regard.

all there’s left is to incorporate some USB hub inside and that’s it.

there were some restomods, like the X62.

I wanted to do something similar with a 2007 17" macbook pro. they have LOTS of space inside and the keyboard, touchpad, camera, etc are all USB, so reusing them would be easy.