Evan I apologize it seems I may have caused you more frustration not less by suggesting Clonezilla. I am still confident that it is a very useful tool for doing what you want to do but I have been using it for so long I didn't consider the learning curve and the old style cryptic user interface. I only use it in beginner mode myself. In hindsight I should have offered you the image file from my Clonezilla USB stick so you could make one in less than 10 minutes using dd, knowing that it is reliable and works. It boots from both MBR and EFI. And I should have included steps with screenshots in my original reply post. In terms of finding Windows, Windows is almost always placed on sda1 and sda2, sda1 being the little boot partition (100 MB originally and now I think 250 MB), and sda2 the main Windows system partition. For name brand systems with recovery / install to factory default partitions, sda1 is often but not always used pushing the Windows boot and active Windows system partitions to sda2 and sda3.

I will write a blog post describing these steps for anyone who might want to use Clonezilla in the future. I did this for my father years ago.

On the distro front, like you my preferred desktop environment is KDE. I like a fully featured desktop and KDE has equal or better functionality than Windows. I make this suggestion with some trepidation but here is one thought for a medium-term solution. Install KUbuntu 20.04 LTS. It is supported for another year and I imagine it will install successfully on your system as it is mature and is mainstream. I don't like snap either but you can install Chrome natively and Chromium running under snap seems to be okay. I also use Firefox and Brave and those browsers are installed natively. I think all of the other applications I use are natively installed, not snapcraft packages. I have used KUbuntu 14.04, 18.04 and now 20.04 as my main production systems. At least this way you will have a year to find a longer-term solution.

I can't find the URL for the article I used to remove the snapcraft version of Chrome and replace it with the natively installed version but a quick search on Google / DuckDuckGo should yield such articles / forum posts. I'll go through my log notes to see if I can find the original post I used and will report back if I find it.

On Sat, May 7, 2022 at 11:04 PM Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

Or maybe I'm not keeping track of chapters.

As some of you know, I've been on a quest to upgrade my daily desktop from Windows to a dual-boot Linux system (and eventually, I hope, to eliminate Windows). As some of you know, I've been replacing systems with dual-boot (first Unix, then Linux) on systems for almost 30 years, though I don't have that technical a bent. But I swear, things are getting harder rather than easier for the non-technical.

First step was backing up the Windows and getting ready on my newer, double-the-size M.2 drive. Cloning the old drive was the best option, but not using Clonezilla which was absolutely useless to me. Couldn't find the Windows drive, despite multiple tries. Maybe it did, but its UI is beyond awful. Tried many hours before giving up. I had considerably greater success with the free version of Macrium Reflect, which knew exactly what I wanted to do and did it with ease.

Swapping the hardware was easy enough, given that my system's motherboard has two M.2 sockets even though it's several years old. System boots Windows just fine, identical to what I had before except I now have 250GB unallocated.

Online help about how to partition a Linux system is as confused as ever, some saying a single partition will do for everything, and others saying that even a UEFI system needs a separate ext4 partition for /boot even if there is an existing EFI one already there.

And then the final step (i thought) -- installing. I decided, after hearing from everyone here, that MX Linux KDE would be the best combination of things I needed and things I didn't. Downloaded the bootable image and used Rufus, where I had to decide if the bootable USB stick would be GPT or MBR (not obvious to a newcomer). All loaded, reboot, and ....

no graphics.

The mouse pointer shows up for a half second and vanishes, with the screen at alt-F1 inviting me to do a CLI install whose partition choices threaten to wipe out my windows system and don't have an intuitive way to customize.

Thankfully (I think), I was able to scp the X.org log file to another computer so I wouldn't lose it on the USB stick's live boot. I attach it below, and ask assistance from anyone who can read these files so I can understand why it's dying. My graphics card is a fairly recent AMD RX 6500 XT which works fine under Windows and is claimed to be supported by X.

Or do I just give up on MX? A search on its forum appears to draw blanks, except for me to boot in failsafe mode which didn't change anything. Will this be better on another distro?

One option is to boot a gparted live stick, partition as I want, install Linux VIA MX's CLI and pray it updates with current graphics drivers. But sheesh.

One would think that given 20 years to improve the install experience, it can be more confusing than ever. Any help is appreciated.

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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