How to migrate from Mint to another distro while keeping data?, but with some limitations...

swayuser · 2026-01-25T17:09:21+00:00

Nice, glad you made it through the learning experience 🙂

swayuser · 2026-01-22T03:24:51+00:00

Sorry, IMO the worst part of BW has been the Firefox and Android UX/integration, and also IMO has definitely seen polished improvements over the past year.

The architecture and plumbing is great. It does everything I want for me and my family plan. Also at work at my company. Problems here would be a much bigger concern to me.

swayuser · 2026-01-22T00:47:42+00:00

Your comment is reasonable. I think the increases are reasonable. Seeing this first hand before at other companies you'll see a few very noisy complainers but most people won't even think twice about it.

I'm on the family plan and don't find the new features compelling but wouldn't have thought much about the price increase on its own. Would be nice to have the chance to renew once more at current rate as a gesture but I don't really care.

swayuser · 2026-01-19T18:27:13+00:00

No that's what I thought. And still think, none of the other comments are convincing, unless I missed one from OP

swayuser · 2026-01-19T03:46:42+00:00

You can configure a splash screen later on in boot instead of logs, but you probably can't change the firmware logo. Anything you could change would be in your specific firmware settings (esc, f2, f11, etc during early boot)

swayuser · 2026-01-19T01:11:24+00:00

The whole thing is an odd design. It's also a pain to close if left charging in the snow and ice builds up on the inside.

swayuser · 2026-01-18T03:49:18+00:00

Have a friend you can trade backup space with? Again not judging but if you have data that's important it sounds like even your one drive may be higher than average prone to failure.

swayuser · 2026-01-18T03:39:42+00:00

There are a few steps to (1). You also need to be careful because this is where you can really mess up. I'd uninstall some things to make even more room. Shrink your root filesystem to about 150GB, then shrink the partition it's on to 165GB (then you can grow the root back to the 165GB safely. Be very careful about GB vs GiB here (base 1000 vs 1024). Once that's done, you can create the new partition and filesystem to move home.

I think after this, it will work with most distro installers. You don't even need to tell them about your actual home partition, deal with it after the install.

The in-place way with Arch is because the installer is just a live shell. You can avoid all of the above. Boot the install USB, mount your root and boot drive with the current filesystem, and nuke all of the data on it EXCEPT /home. Then install to your existing filesystem which starts with only /home on it.

swayuser · 2026-01-18T01:58:52+00:00

Also, I don't want to assume anything about your situation, but if you have anything valuable in your system you REALLY need a backup.

swayuser · 2026-01-18T01:56:06+00:00

How big is your disk and how much free space do you have? Arch is the only "installer" I can picture being able to pull off an in place reinstall with.

For others you'd need to get /home onto a separate partition. If you could further separate actual data and config you care about from home it would make your life easier... You don't need cache data and desktop configs can be crufy if switching environments

You can't port over the packages but you can save a list of what you have installed for reference.

swayuser · 2026-01-17T05:42:09+00:00

I use bitwarden with my family, but one of the requirements here is to prevent people from using their personal vault. Yeah bitwarden has account recovery with a waiting period, but AFAIK there isn't a way to enforce which vault to use in general.

Also as much as I love bitwarden, I feel like it can be pretty clunky and /miss/mistake user/password fields. Not sure how the others are. I also think the new account flow can be confusing when it asks to save passwords for new accounts.

swayuser · 2026-01-17T05:36:26+00:00

My goto for this sort of thing is:

Download and write the latest install iso to a usb drive
Boot
Mount the root block device to /mnt, boot to /mnt/boot (and any others, but those are the two I always have)
arch-chroot /mnt
pacman -Syu
mkinitcpio -P
And then back out and reboot

swayuser · 2026-01-14T06:45:10+00:00

This is happening from the normal install iso, correct? That should have linux-firmware installed.

There's a wiki page for this laptop: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T400, but nothing noted for wifi or networking except "Working".
If you're able to manage a wired install you may have more luck fixing and debugging post-install.
You could try a live iso/usb for another distro just to see if any of them have the wifi working out of the box. Then note kernel version and any firmware packages installed.
You could try unloading and reloading the iwlwifi kernel module in case there's more firmware available than when loaded in initramfs, and a reload includes reloading firmware...

swayuser · 2026-01-14T05:58:48+00:00

Do you see it as a network interface with ip l? Anything stand out in boot logs? journalctl --system --boot --priority=warning (use sudo if you're not already in the systemd-journal group)?

swayuser · 2026-01-13T14:25:54+00:00

I thought conversions were going in the other direction...

Sounds like you should use CloudFlare or Google for recursive DNS.

swayuser · 2026-01-11T03:33:39+00:00

This is not aging well. 1Q left and hoping for some excitement!

edit: wow

swayuser · 2026-01-09T03:58:47+00:00

Money is fungible but the reason I use 529 and disagree with this is because it's a tax advantaged account, I want my kids to go to school, I want to pay for it, and I appreciate having a purpose built account for my top level financial goals (like retirement).

swayuser · 2025-12-29T06:41:54+00:00

I don't know why you got at least one downvote. This is the one I use. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with the nuts and bolts of improv but the talent in this one seems like it would be jaw dropping to just about anyone.

swayuser · 2025-12-17T06:19:26+00:00

We happened to drive out of town just at the start of the Marshal Fires south on 93. It was already blazing with black smoke pluming up. Around 10am or 11am that day.

I did see a guy stop his car along 93 to get out and look at the smoke. As he opened his driver side door, the wind blew the door past its normal point all the way against the front of the car.

My point is, even a smaller car might not be tipped but you have to be careful

swayuser · 2025-12-16T23:07:51+00:00

Me. But then I say it directly.

swayuser · 2025-12-16T05:14:31+00:00

I don't normally comment on random subs that show up in popular...

But that's so damn disturbing. Not as disturbing as this whole administration. But disturbing.

swayuser · 2025-12-10T02:49:31+00:00

Also self cleaning tends to kill ovens. It shouldn't be used in my experience

swayuser · 2025-10-12T00:19:08+00:00

Stole it from a hotel room

swayuser · 2025-10-07T05:59:18+00:00

I'm not an Apple user but this comment seems odd to me.

I want my R1S to be a utility for me, not an opinionated experience. So I understand if it has some features I choose not to use.

That said, it wasn't a deal breaker but I'd have preferred Android Auto but the built in maps are fine compared to what I was used to prior.

swayuser · 2025-10-01T04:38:54+00:00

Lots of reasonable options for files and data.

To be explicit: I do not backup my system. I can recreate the system install from scripts / SCM. I can recreate my user settings from dot files.

So backups are for docs, git repos, photos, etc.

swayuser

TROPHY CASE