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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 (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.
I wanted to deploy it on my old Acer Aspire 5737z but it won’t boot. It’s just displaying a — on a black screen for hours.
I’m not so knowledgeable but I guess it means I would have to reinstall the GRUB or whatever.
I’ve booted into my Fedora Live USB and tried the lsblk command people were talking about on the web (I don’t understand the terminal). Here's the result.
I think the SDA disk is the one I would like to boot from.
Can anyone help me understand what I have to do 😇🙏
++. Yes, and not your standard Linux distro in design, never mind the hurdle of understanding Nix expressions and functional programming language. However, once tweaked, deployment on multiple machines is straightforward.
Cloning the system and home partitions always worked fine for me with openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop. Another option openSUSE offers is AutoYaST
AutoYaST is a system for unattended mass deployment of openSUSE Leap systems. It uses an AutoYaST profile that contains installation and configuration data.
AutoYaST is a system for unattended mass deployment of openSUSE Leap systems. It uses an AutoYaST profile that contains installation and configuration data. Th…
For reproducibility, nothing really beats NixOS. That's not really what you're asking for, as that would not involve Clonezilla.
If you're frequently switching hardware, and want to have everything up and running, configured to your liking, in minutes, you're gonna have fun with NixOS in the long term. But I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, it has a steep learning curve and does require you to enjoy some tinkering. Worth it, imo
Otherwise, just pick a distro that you enjoy and create a separate home partition, when it's time to switch you do a fresh install and clone only the home partition. That'll get you 90% of the way to have your old setup on the new device
Your settings for the most part are in your home directory, generally when you install a Linux system everything that isn't the bootloader is on one partition (system, installed applications, etc)
Your home directory is for anything specific to your user, meaning your downloads folder, your pictures, documents and also your .config folder which holds 90% of the config files
There are some weird ones that have directories outside of home, afaik that's stuff like network manager remembering your saved networks that runs outside of your user context
Bazzite is a custom image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.
Any of the many immutable distros (vanilla os, fedora silverblue, bluefin, aeon, endless os, pure os, ...) will all obviously work.
Most of your customizations will live in your home directory anyway, so the details of the host OS do not matter too much. As long as it comes with the UI you like, you will be mostly fine. And yku said you like gnome, that installs many apps from flathub anyway and they work just fine from there.
For development work you just set up a distrobox/toolbox container and are ready to go with everything you need. I much prefer that over working on the "real system" as I can have different environments for different projects and do not have to polute my system with all kinds of dependencies that are useless to the functionality of my system.
NixOS is ofmcourse also an option and is quasi-immutable, but it is also much more complicated to manage.
So the question is this: Do you want to be able to reproduce the system exactly, or are you fine taking a few hours to reinstall software. If you're just wanting to keep settings and data for apps rather than the apps themselves, you can cut down on your storage requirements a lot.
If it's the latter, all of your user settings should be in your home directory ("/home/username" or just "~"). If you back that up, you should be able to recover your settings and data on a fresh install of your distro of choice.
I'd jump on the bandwagon of nixos, I use it myself and love it, does exactly what you're asking for
However judging on some of your other comments it might be a better idea to just suck up having to manually rebuild until you understand the basics of Linux a little better
(nixos more or less requires you understand programming syntax for writing your system config)
You install it and then save a copy of the disk. This is very similar to a VM template so I will just link instructions for that. The difference is you are using physical hardware.
I am trying to make a template for my Ubuntu VMs mostly by following Techno Tim's instructions here. I differ from Tim by wanting to also install qemu-guest-agent so I can get the IP of the vm with...
If you want to actually replicate one to one - any distro, and use dd or netcat to transfer the root partition. Reinstall the bootloader, update BLKIDs and you're done. Worked for me multiple times.
If you want something simple that does this for you: check out SaveDesktop. I'm not sure if it will meet every need, but it works for me when I need to switch.
I was not able to reproduce that bug, but I also did not change anything in flatseal, I think you shoulf just reset the permissions and/or reinstall and just try it normally.
I tried it normally but then it had another problem so that’s why I tried to gove it more access through Flatseal as recommended on the SaveDesktoo Github page.
I’ll have a deeper look when I get the time. Thanks
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?
Well I don’t distro hop so I don’t think it would be used more than once a year.
The only thing is that I would want the way I’ve configured Gnome, Joplin, Thunderbird, Gnome Calendar (only for the widget), my Gnome extensions, what program is automatically opened on what workspace, etc to be saved so that it could be reproduced on another computer easily.
My documents, pictures, etc are already taken care of so it ain’t a problem.
I know I could do the same thing by writing a tutorial and just spending a couple of hours every time I reinstall. But I would want to just be able to replicate my install/settings if possible.
Someone kindly mentioned SaveDesktop and for now it seems like the way to go since simply cloning with Clonezilla doesn’t seem to work. I just have to make it work.
The only thing is that I would want the way I’ve configured Gnome, Joplin, Thunderbird, Gnome Calendar (only for the widget), my Gnome extensions, what program is automatically opened on what workspace, etc to be saved so that it could be reproduced on another computer easily.
These sound like user settings that don't even exist outside ~/ . Rsync is your friend. So is git, gluster, syncthing, resilio, and a good bunch of others depending on how often you want synch to occur and how much time you have to spend.
I don't know how clonezilla works, but one thing I've discovered that causes issues when you copy a Linux distro from one machine to another, assuming you do a file system copy and not a raw partition copy so the new file system partition has a different UUID than the old, you need to fix the UUID in both /etc/fstab and /etc/initramfs-tools/resume before it will work properly.
Clonezilla covers this, it regens the partition with the correct uuid.
My guess is some uefi or other boot weirdness, you have to register keys with the new system during install before it will let you boot, that's probably where things went wrong.
I'm going to mention Ansible as I haven't seen it mentioned, and it can be used to locally manage a reproducible build.
It has already been mentioned, but as a minimum to replicate your system you need two things: - Transfer/copy your entire /home directory as there is where the majority of the configuration files of your system pertaining the software you use (there could be configs you could need on /etc and on /usr/local or other dir), that is why it is recommended to partition your disk on installation of your distro, so the /home directory is already separated, as if you reinstall in the same machine you don't lose any configuration in addition to your personal documents/pictures/etc - Have a way to automatically install a list of programs/apps/drivers/libraries, and that is what something like a bash script, Ansible, nixOs, etc. could help you with.
The truth is that using any of the tools in the second point requires learning a bunch, so if your skill level is still not there, there is some work to do to get there.
Personally, I use Fedora Silverblue and use bash scripts for reproducibility. To set up a new system, all I need to to is install, reboot, run my bash script, reboot, and my system is 90% configured. With bash scripts, I am able to reproduce more of my system than I could when I used NixOS.
A lot of people recommend Nix, but the thing about Nix is that you're only declaring how the system is configured. Not your home folder. You need to rely on third party tools for that.
Bash scripts can configure system and home folder. They can also be used on any distro, whereas a Nix configuration file only works on NixOS.
Though the worst part about any new install is just signing back into everything, especially an annoyance when you have proper 2FA setup. Bash scripts or Nix can't solve that unless you migrate data over.
As someone who spent time in OS Build/Relmgmt before security, I have a pressing desire to play the "how do you know" game, here.