data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • 5 Posts
  • 197 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 7th, 2024

help-circle



  • I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It’s not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you’re up for it, I used this tutorial. If it’s an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.

    As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I’m going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).





  • You’ll probably notice very little difference, especially if you go with one of the default partition layouts. If you were to manually lay it out, you’d need to make sure you have an EFI partition on a GPT partition table, but otherwise it should be normal.

    Like others have said, Secure Boot can be miserable, but in my experience, it works automagically with Debian so long as you stick to official kernel packages. The only hiccup I’ve had before (assuming a normal kernel package) is that on my shiny new Thinkpad E16, I had to go into the UEFI settings and enable non-Microsoft certificates (it was a single toggle). After that, my experience with Debian was pretty smooth (I had a minor issue with Wi-Fi, but it’s not relevant to your question).





  • I might recommend a 2-in-1 Thinkpad. I can’t speak for all models, but my 1st generation Surface Go brought me misery when running Debian Testing on it - power profiles weren’t supported quite right and the camera was hard to set up.

    If you have the budget, the Star Lite seems pretty nice as a Linux tablet, although you should do your own research - I don’t own one. Personally, I have a Thinkpad E16 for college.


  • You might be right. I was thinking of it in terms of a traditional distro, as I use vanilla Debian where my advice would apply and yours probably wouldn’t.

    From what I do know, though, I guess /etc would be part of the writable roots overlaid onto the immutable image, so it would make sense if the immutable image was sort of the initramfs and was read when root was mounted or something. Your command is probably the correct one for immutable systems.