It depends on how you install stuff. Games on Steam or downloaded from online from places like itch.io can be put on any drive without issue.

In terms of software though, native packages (deb, rpm) are gonna want to put files in various system folders, so it’s pretty much impossible to get those off your os drive.

Other packaging solutions can help with this though. Appimages can be put anywhere, nix let’s you install to another drive, same with flatpak.

And if you’re savvy, you could use docker to install system packages on other drives, although I wouldn’t recommend it.

So I use a surface device with the Linux surface kernel, and there was (and probably still is) an issue where the type cover doesn’t properly rebind after being detached and re-attatched. To make matters worse, connecting other USB devices disconnected the type cover. My solution was to make a udev rule that detected if the keyboard is “removed” and then try to rebind it, effectively unplugging it and plugging it back in again in software.

I… What? Why does that work? How did you figure this out?

I had been considering switching for years, I even made a list of things I had to find alternatives to and tried to widdle it down. With proton making gaming viable, I decided to dual boot, and accidentally destroyed my entire windows partition when trying to back it up with dd. Just said fuck it and went full Linux.

Fear?

Don’t buy windows from eBay! You can download an iso for free from microsoft. Flash that to a USB and install it that way (or as others have suggested, just use a VM). It won’t be activated but you don’t need that for what you’re doing: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11

If you don’t need windows 11, I actually recommend 10 ltsc. It doesn’t come with all the bloat and adware that normal windows comes with: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise

Somewhat, but it’s not a virus. It’s contained to it’s own file system unless it does something really stupid, and I can easily remove the while whole thing. But the reason i needed it privileged is because it loads the ppp kernel module, so if you know a way to do that without privileged mode, lmk.

For me it had to be run with --privileged and --network=host

For some reason I also had to do “ip r add {remote IP}/{mask} via {the public IP assigned by the vpn}”. A friend who knows more about networking found that out for me though, so I’m not entirely sure about it.

Had to install a VPN for work, and if you didn’t have a rhel-based distros you had to use a bash install script, and the installed executable had embedded bash and sh scripts. Needless to say I ran that thing in a docker container.

I have a surface go 3 running Fedora, and use xournal++ for notetaking. Idk if it can export to svg but it works well and has plenty of features.

Reaper. Great usability and decent Linux support out of the box (looking at you, davinci resolve). Generous free trial and a cheap one-time payment for a license. LMMS has served me well and is fine for basic stuff, but reaper is a whole other level, both in features and usability. I’ve heard good things about ardour too but have yet to give it a try.

I recently found out that Nemo has this feature as well (the default file manager for cinnamon)

The idea of free software is extremely socialist/communist. People working together to create something that anyone can use for free, with profit being a non-existent or at least minor motivator.