Probably not without LVM or an external drive to restore from. Depending on which partition comes first, you’ll either have to extend the OS partition “leftward” or lop off the front of the data partition, and there isn’t a good way to do either nondestructively.

If you have LVM set up, you could reduce the storage partition, make a partition in the new free space, and lump it into the volume group for the OS partition.

Sorry about that, you are right. The way I originally envisioned would have disrupted the partitioning of the original ISO. Tried it myself and ran into the same issue, then finally recalled how I actually did it. See my edited comment above. Unfortunately, changing out the ISO non-destructively might be harder than I originally thought.

Looks amazing. I was just thinking about my friend who keeps Windows around for iTunes syncing yesterday, one more thing I can suggest to people moving to Linux.

The only time I find myself in line with CLI purists is when I need to SSH into a machine without X forwarding. Had no idea that there were terminal PDF viewers, but now I know if I ever need to consult a document remotely.

My friend

• loves making and sharing home videos, but his entire workflow is tied to Windows Movie Maker
• his wife insists on using an iPhone and is tech-illiterate, so depends on him having iTunes for syncing stuff
• has bad memories of Linux from the 2000s and has grown comfortable with a copy of Windows that I’ve debloated

If you don’t want Ventoy:

1. Wipe the USB: wipefs -a /dev/sdb
2. Copy the ISO image to the USB: dd of=/dev/sdb if=/path/to/image/linux.ISO bs=1M status=progress
3. Make the data partition in the free space: cfdisk /dev/sdb, don’t remove the iso9660 signature, create partition in the free space, and Write.
4. Format the partition with filesystem of your choice: mkfs, cryptsetup, etc.

(everything as root, replace /dev/sdb with the location of your USB)

As is, this only leaves exactly enough for the ISO you are currently working with, sealing the fate of the data partition if you need to swap out the ISO. I suspect there is a workaround in theory, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.

Also see https://github.com/thias/glim, a GRUB-based alternative to Ventoy, albeit with less compatibility.

Edit: this will not work with Windows ISOs and the data partition won’t show up in certain versions of Windows, in case anyone is wondering

You’ve survived and perhaps thrived booting off the HDD for a while, so I would wipe the SSD and install Linux there if you intend to switch over at some point. That’s what I did for my test bench, my last personal machine with Windows; Linux on an SSD and Windows on an old HDD, where the slow speeds don’t really bother my infrequent use.

As someone who did use this guide as an exercise in making my setup as secure as it could be without changing distros or hampering productivity, a few words of advice:

• Make a threat model for yourself before diving in and apply the mitigations judiciously. It’s not exactly a checklist, just use something secureblue or Qubes if you are really paranoid about your computer.
• The majority of the mitigations ‘just work’ and have no noticeable impact on performance, battery life, or compatibility.
• If your CPU/Memory performance widget breaks, dial back on the ptrace options
• If Flatpaks fail to launch, dial back on the namespace options
• Check back every so often because some of the options end up having unwanted side-effects with updates. See the preamble in boot parameters, where a change in Linux made in 2021 (which finally made it into Debian Stable this year) made the slub_debug mitigation actually worsen security.

Even if they did, your messages are going to be scanned via your recipients who use Gmail without opting out.

Interesting, had no idea until now that there’s such a thing as first-party malware loaded with the BIOS. Admittedly I’m caught in an ivory tower with my Corebooted ThinkPad. Although I haven’t purchased one yet, I’d say you made the right choice going with Framework.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad line has a sterling reputation. Among the best in terms of quality, service, repairability, and Linux support.

As for the largely consumer-grade options of ASUS and Lenovo’s consumer-grade IdeaPads, they’re rather similar in reputation and quality. Not exceptional, but they’re both perfectly fine options as long as you avoid the budget laptop segment (plastic chassis, broken hinges, etc.)

Any difference in privacy would come down to the pre-installed software, which is irrelevant if you plan on using Linux. If you will be using Windows, it’s always better to install your own fresh copy to purge any potential spyware and bloatware installed by the manufacturer. The activation key for whichever edition of Windows it comes with is embedded in the BIOS, so it’ll activate automatically after a fresh reinstall.

the only way i escaped this until now as being able to afford the hefty price tags on linux-only hardware with something like system76 and i can’t afford it anymore since i no longer earn a software engineer’s salary.

Why not a second-hand ThinkPad/Latitude/ProBook? They’re cheap and cheerful and well-supported by most distros.

the only viable alternative would be to build septic tank

Me realizing I’m ahead of the game because I live in a home with a septic tank. But when you have to pump that tank every 5 years, if you can’t do that yourself, it’s going to be a lot less anonymous than a centralized sewer.

It’s there to protect you from crimes of opportunity. Like if your car is locked, a thief could decide to pick the lock, smash the windows in, or find another victim, but they would have no second thoughts if your car were already unlocked. The password deters a casual hacker and buys you some time to notice and deal with anyone seriously trying to break in.

In an ideal case of disk encryption and a well-designed lock screen, the password forces a would-be intruder to either spend lots of time guessing it or shut down the computer, thereby discarding the encryption key from memory and thwarting the attack.

Good starting point would be looking up forum or blog posts from people who have disconnected the modem/TCU on a particular EV model. No self-interested auto manufacturer (all of them) would intentionally provide an option in the user interface to take the telemetry system offline. Take note of any side-effects they report, if it needs to be reconnected for inspections, and if there’s any gotchas between software and hardware revisions.

Especially wrt. modern gas-fuelled cars for the typical driver as EV prices are artificially jacked up in many Western countries.

Keeping an eye on it since no other company is offering a similar lack of connectivity, but also not going to be surprised if it doesn’t deliver on its promises.

As a perfectionist myself, perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s good that you’re still learning and finding possible improvements. If you haven’t already, may I suggest organizing a copy of your customizations and dotfiles in one neat location? Saves a lot of mental anguish when you need to track down that edit to a config file you made some months ago.

What privacy though? The situation with LinkedIn just like Instagram. Even though they aren’t open for scraping, there’s still no expectation of privacy among the users who post anything.

I daily drive Debian now, but several years ago when a couple of my computers were still very new, I used Arch since it has bleeding-edge support for new hardware while being still thoroughly documented in the Arch Wiki.

The sheer volume of packages on the official repo and the AUR made it great for discovering which desktop environment I wanted to use and for software-hopping in general too. You can have as much or as little on your system as you want and nothing is forced on you.