BananaTrifleViolin

Moving away from Ubuntu makes absolute sense from what they describe.

I do wonder though, is basing a distro on Debian Testing a good idea? I understand them not wanting to go to the Debian stable as they already have issues with big drift for the cutting edge tools they want to ship breaking have the unintended consequences of breaking stable software. But Debian Testing will add in a constant shift in all the packages; they may be more recent but there is a much greater exposure to bugs.

Tuxedo’s OS will itself become a testing ground for packages in a way it wasn’t before. They’re both moving away from Ubuntu AND moving away from a LTS base. Though I suppose they can always re-base to Debian Stable at it’s next big release if they do find it too cumbersome.

Still, I wonder if this will happen with other distros. I know Mint has a Debian flavour which is seemingly described as a backup “plan B” in-case they felt the need to shift. I can also see the constant forcing of Snap into the ecosystem, and now the vague AI stuff that Tuxedo quote would also prompt a lot of distros to decide how dependent should they be on Ubuntu going forward.

I’m honestly not surprised. There is a bit of a narrative that “obviously” the UK should rejoin the EU but its actually not that simple, particularly within the UK.

Brexit was a hugely toxic and disruptive political event that dominated politics for the best part of a decade. Many people just don’t want to reopen that - Brexit has been an overall negative but not as negative as feared at the time of the referendum, which has muted the fight to rejoin. And there are benefits that have come into UK politics - the big one being direct democratic accountability in so much as it is now impossible for MPs to blame the EU or Brussels for all our ills.

Brexit has destroyed the Conservative party, and seemingly destroyed the old 2 party switch between Labour and Conservatives. We’ve had the rise of Reform on the right but also the rise of the Greens on the left, and we are looking at a hung parliament in the next election; we have 5 parties all close to the 20% mark and the First Past the Post system means huge uncertainty with what will happen in the next election.

From businesses point of view I can see that stability and certainty far outweighs discussions around the customs union or single market. Throwing EU discussions back into the current political mix would be chaotic and toxic again. I don’t buy the CBI’s line about trade deals with India etc helping though; I suspect this is carefully chosen to throw a bone to the right wing anti-EU lobby so that the CBI can continue to waver on the EU.

Politically people in the UK are dissatisfied with the current order and there is a lot of uncertainty about where things will be in the next election. Europe is not part of that discussion at the moment - it’d be a gift to Reform to fight on Brexit yet again, and also divide the left who are not uniformly pro-EU. Instead we are in a period of uncertainty on who will win the next election, with discussions of devolution (akin to perhaps greater federalisation of the UK including crucially England) and electoral reform coming to the fore - things that would mean real change. Discussions around the EU would just distract from that; many people genuinely don’t want to go back to elections dominated about in/out/“brexit means brexit” nonsense.

Ok, the best way to do this is to install VM software on linux (I use KVM/QEMU) then make a new Windows guest and install from scratch using a Windows install ISO file. It’s the better method as the new Windows install will have no bloat from your original install, the boot partition will be set up properly and there won’t be redundant old drivers and configuration issues that could be very messy in the guest.

I have a KVM/QEMU windows VM with a license that runs fine; I use it rarely mainly to use work’s version of MS Office. You can migrate the license from your original install over to the VM so you don’t have to pay for a new Windows license. If you also have data to transfer into the VM from the original windows partition, you can either directly mount that partition inside the VM or mount the partition in your Linux host as a read only partition, and then share that as a folder into the VM. Then you can transfer any files you want into within your guest machine (e.g. within the windows guest copy files from the shared folder, drive D: onto the guests machines drive C:). It’s much much easier than the complexity and issues of cloning an existing partition and trouble shooting it to work in a VM.

If you really want to go down the route of taking the current installed OS and move that into a VM image, then the best way is making a disk image of the whole windows drive (assuming it’s a boot partition + C: drive) or clone both the boot partition + windows partitions into their own files if it’s a shared drive with Linux. There are lots of tools that can do this; “dd” and “partclone” are 2 particularly common tools you can use from a linux terminal to create a .img file of the partitions, and then you mount those into a VM. But messing with Windows boot partitions is always messy, and you’ll likely also need a Windows Recover disc to also mount in the partition to “repair” the boot partition in the new machine. You will also have to troubleshoot hardware issues if Windows can’t cope with the sudden complete hardware change from your host PC to the new virtual hardware.

Honestly, make a fresh Windows machine in a VM and transfer your files in. It’s far easier.

EDIT:
Here is a good guide to setting up a Windows guest in KVM/QEMU including TPM 2.0 for linux.

https://computingforgeeks.com/windows-11-installation-on-kvm-with-virt-manager/

Then with once you have a working Windows VM, this is a good guide for setting up a shared folder (I’d mount your windows drive within your Linux host as RO, and then share the mount point as a folder into your guest; that reduces the risk of data loss):

https://www.debugpoint.com/kvm-share-folder-windows-guest/

I didn’t write these guides but have read them through and they’re what I’d do/did for my Windows VM. If you choose to migrate your drive instead, you’ll still need to set up the hardware of the virtual machine as in these guides, but instead of creating a new virtual drive file, use the disk image you create from your windows partitions.

Before you do anything, backup /home.

You can reinstall your system while preserving and expanding your /home partition; this is probably the cleanest and safest way to sort your disk. It allows you to move the boot and filesystem partitions to the start of the disk while keeping /home untouched, and then separately resize /home to fill the rest of the drive. You could not reinstall and manually move the partition but it’s slow and riskier when messing with a boot and main filesystem partition; much easier to start again tbh.

I’d get a USB and install Ventoy on it. Ventoy is a great bootable USB tool that lets you drop multiple different bootable ISOs on it (instead of reflashing the drive every time) & pick one at boot; great for installs and also to keep around as a recovery drive. I’d then put on it an ISO file of your preferred linux distro, and also a separate ISO file of a good live distro for recovery. GParted Live is particularly good USB live distro for this because resizing the partition is the aim, but almost any good USB Live Distro will do

I’d then boot up the USB drive and select the ISO for your Linux distro’s installer. During install, in the partition section, I’d then use the partition tool in your installer. Dlete all the windows partitions (sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4), and then delete the exisiting boot (/boot/efi) and root file system (/) and create new ones at the beginning of the disk: 1gb /boot/efi and 85gb / system partiton as you have now, and ensure the existing /home partition is kept and mounted as /home in the new install. You’ll have loads of free unpartitioned space; leave that for now.

After the system is reinstalled, I’d boot in, check everything is ok, and then restart and boot the USB again, this time selecting GParted Live. Then with GParted Live, I’d resize the /home partition to fill all the empty space.

But as I said, before you do anything, backup /home. Also before you do anything you can use a partition tool now (like KDE Partition or Gparted) to add a label/name to your /home drive so there is no confusion when you use use the Linux installer or Gparted later. But it should be clear from the size alone.

Switchdesk is a GUI for changing the default desktop once they’re installed, not for installing desktops.

The top of the page you link explains how to install alternative desktops which is using DNF. The GUI route to do this would be to use a DNF frontend like DNFDragora and search for the relevant desktop metapackage, and then install that.

Yeah this seems a fair summary, although I think the question more accurately should be “Why do AAA games now take 6+ years to make?”

There are plenty of smaller and indie games that don’t take 6 years. There are also plenty of smaller and indie games that do take 6+ years but for somewhat different reasons.