It’s a good idea to use what you know. I don’t have much experience with btrfs but if it does what it says on the tin then it should be safe to use.

Copying the contents at the target is a good strategy. If the drives are to be put into 27/7 use later I would probably consider wiping them and run an integrity test before putting them to use, as once they start being used it will be too late (and stay as a doubt in the back of my mind).

From a position of handling corporate data on a daily basis, I am pretty confident that data integrity is top of mind.

How do you ensure that is doesn’t happen? If this is corporate data that can be key.

It could very well be that the package got updated. I did the change once and let it be.

Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.

If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.

Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.

Serious games hardware testing channels like Gamers Nexus is a great progression. It brings Linux more into the mainstream while also putting a spotlight on driver deficiencies as well as weaknesses in the OS. How far we have come since the PopOS DE being removed by LTT.

I have X-Plane 12 on Linux and am re-building an approximation of my MSFS setup. The main issues are

• Head-tracking is proving challenging.
• Streamdeck integration is a work in progress
• Navigraph integration is a non-starter. AIRAC updates are completely manual where there are apps on Windows.
• Many 3rd party addons for Garmin navigation are only available on Windows as they rely on the official Garmin trainer software.

The list goes on, but at least X-Plane is a first class citizen on Linux. My controllers work out of the box with only minor deficiencies (drivers for announciator lights are missing).

The work is proceeding, but as the license for X-Plane is valid in Windows as well it’s too easy to just have everything work there.

Signal on flatpak works well, and I agree. The only thing I had to do was edit it with flatseal to let it access my home directory - sending files and pictures didn’t work properly until I did that.

Flatpak can be confusing when you try to access the file system without the rights until you realize it’s the sandbox config.

I suppose I am one of those, although the process has been gradual over the last years.

Do I still use Windows? Yes - I earn a living designing and developing solutions in the ecosystem, although it is mostly on the corp server side of things. Azure can be easily managed on any of the three big OS’s.

Do I dual boot? Yes, but less and less. For gaming, flight sims are still not supported enough on Linux - to many extensions and add-ons are just not there yet. I am primarily on Linux though and all of my non-sim gaming on Linux nowadays. On my work laptop the Windows partition is bricked (as in Windows Update said bye-bye to it), so next re-install of Ubuntu LTS next year will see the Windows partition wiped.

Am I nostalgic about Windows? Not yet, after 1-2 years of Linux practically full time. Win11 is still on a downward trajectory. Linux is getting better with every distro release.

Have I gone more hard core in my Linux journey? I dabble in EndeavorOS, but mostly run Ubuntu. I am happy that it works. I am comfortable in the terminal so any DE works as long as it leaves me be.

Will I go back to Windows? Microsoft have a lot of work in front of them to regain my trust. It will be a harder switch with the Linux experience being as good as it is.

Do I have any sympathy for those who try and revert? Sure - change is difficult for many.

It’s an interesting article. Spoon feeding doesn’t come easy for an engineer, but from what the article conveys a little can go a long way. It’s hard to overestimate the reach of mainstream publications.

I agree. If Zorin lowers the bar for entry enough that some will continue on and perhaps hop to another distro if they outgrow Zorin, then it’s a win. Desktop Linux isn’t going to win everyone over - Apple will pick up some and most will stay on Windows either way.

There will always be a lot of people trying a product out, figuring it’s not for them for whatever reason, and revert back. I don’t see a solution that will retain those people. Change is difficult for a lot of people.

For the Zorin org, even those who shelled out for the Pro edition and jump back to Windows, that income still goes to devs that are working to maintain the Linux ecosystem.

What level of faith do you require from people trying out the OS? What damage is done?

Zorin looks like a great starting-off point for normal (non-tech) people migrating from Windows. Visually it’s much more polished than Mint, based on Gnome and Ubuntu LTS.

Ubuntu LTS means it can also work in a corporate setting as it will get all the vendor support.

The Pro version is a bit of a bait-and-switch as I understand the only unique point is are the skins that give you Window 11 and MacOS look-alike themes. All the rest seems to be an open source software bundle. For Windows (or Mac) users the price isn’t really a negative and can be smart marketing.

For all of us used to the common Linux DE’s, dabble or dive into Arch, do heavy gaming? We aren’t the target audience. And that’s fine.

I know at least one person who has had a couple of false starts with migrating to Linux, is now on Zorin and thinks Zorin is much more polished looking than Mint.

If it lessens the impact of switching operating systems, and holds them in long enough to get comfortable with Linux, alternatively provides just enough Windows-like veneer to be comfortable enough then it is still a win.

Or perhaps dip their toes enough to look into distro-hopping.

Recompiling and replacing libraries was a thing back then - linux had it’s own flavor of ”DLL hell”. I broke a Debian install trying to get an IDE for Mono running by overriding and replacing quite a lot of shared libraries.

That being said I didn’t fully know what I was doing when I started off and the package manager kept warning me.

”You can’t trust free software”

As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.

I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.