this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been a happy user of Fedora Workstation since Fedora 36 on my Surface Go 1.

I really enjoy Gnome and everything is set up the way I want to.

Since I was really happy with my setup I just wanted to be able to replicate it easily through Clonezilla so that I could port it on any future computer I’d get.

Sadly, even with the help of really helpful and knowledgeable users on Lemmy, it hasn’t worked (https://sh.itjust.works/post/25963065).

So now I’m left wondering if there could be a distribution that I’d enjoy and which would be easy to deploy on another computer as I’d hate to have to configure everything on every computer I’d get.

I love Gnome but I wouldn’t be against trying something else if necessary.

What distribution could meet my needs?

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[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ubuntu will boot on either legacy or UEFI.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's not necessarily the problem here.

Normally, Fedora would boot on both types of systems, too. However, OP wants to copy an already-existing UEFI install or at least the config to a legacy system, not (necessarily) to find a distro that could be installed from a normal live installer on both boot types.

Thus the Nix recommendations, as theoretically, one centralized config could be copied between systems to create a similar environment on different systems.

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 1 week ago

@data1701d Ok in that case, boot the os off of a USB and mount all the partitions, start with root on /mnt, then any other partitions relative to /mnt as they would be to root, then mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev, mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts, mount --rbind /sys /mnt/sys, mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc, and then cp /etc/resolv.conf to /mnt/etc/resolv.conf, now chroot /mnt. Once there remove all existing versions of grub and install grub-pc, which is the bios version, next do grub_install /dev/sda or whatever your primary drive is, then exit chroot and halt the system. Now you should have a bios bootable system you can boot on your bios device.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'd happily give technical advice but first I need to understand the actual need.

I don't mean "what would be cool" but rather what's the absolute minimum basic that would make a solution acceptable.

Why do I insist so much? Well because installing a distribution, e.g. Debian, takes less than 1h. Assuming you have a separate /home directory, there is no need to "copy" anything, only mounting correctly. If it is on another physical computer then the speed will depend on the your storage capacity and hardware (e.g. SSD vs HDD). Finally "configuring" each piece of software will take a certain amount of time, especially if you didn't save the configuration (which should be the case).

Anyway, my point being that :

  • installing the OS takes little time
  • copying data across physical devices take a lot more time
  • configuring manually specific software takes a bit of time

So, if you repeat the operation several times a week, investing time to find a solution can be useful. If you do this few times a year or less, it's probably NOT actually efficient.

So, again, is this an intellectual endeavor, for the purpose of knowing what an "ideal' scenario would be or is it a genuine need?

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