Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
Thank you for the warning. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes this not at all just as easy as creating a bootable backup of a Mac! And it’s the kind of thing that makes “this is easy” difficult to take seriously.
Now I know what to search for and I will probably be able to piece it together.
Ugh. No. I still don’t know how to just boot this backup. When I try it in an older laptop, the keyboard and trackpad stop working once I log in. I presume this is a hardware driver problem. Presumably that’s unavoidable.
I am, of course, not eager to screw up the BIOS settings on my daily laptop.
I couldn’t figure out how to boot the cloned drive in a VirtualBox VM. The tutorials seem to assume that I have a virtual disk image or enough internal hard disk space to copy the cloned drive locally in order to run it locally. That defeats the purpose.
So I’m stuck. If I can’t just boot to the USB external drive because of UUID clashes, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to have gained by cloning my laptop’s internal hard disk. I have a backup that I can’t safely boot to. 🤷
I continue to be grateful to anyone willing to try to help me understand how to do this. It’s literally the only thing that stops me from feeling 100% comfortable with a Linux distribution as my everyday OS. I feel like I’ve been living with a ticking timebomb for the past eight years.
UPDATE: I booted to Pop!_OS, then used
chroot, but this is not what I was expecting.Well yes, but with a current Mac there are its own issues. It probably won’t boot at all, or by design it will fall back to the internal drive even if you tell it to boot from USB
It also can silently corrupt your data on either disk because of how it handles updates if you continue to do use both at the same time.