I use Garuda on my daily driver and I love it. I distro hopped for years and I’m finally home. It’s not hard like trying to do your own Arch from scratch. It’s like some super geek setup Linux for me with all the bells and whistles just the way I want it. I had to ditch the dragon theme and then it was perfect. And snapper is so well setup and integrated with Garuda, there’s rarely a case where a clean install is warranted. I highly recommend it.

I’ve had similar experiences moving to Linux on various machines. I don’t yet understand the pattern. Why do some distros work better on some machines than others?

I have an original MS Surface Pro. Ubuntu works best on it, imo.

I have a 10 year old Asus laptop that has all kinds of seemingly random issues - currently on Mint but about to migrate to OpenSuse.

I have a 4 year old Dell laptop and it likes Garuda the best.

Go figure.

I love Ventoy for this reason. I can try 8 different distros till I find one that works best on a particular machine.

I think it’s also pushing subscription based cloud services. To me, the SD card slot is a convenient backup target when away from home. It fits my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Without it, more people will consider backing up to paid cloud services, like how Apple does it.

For the record, I hate this trend. Hands off my sd slot and my 3.5mm jack. But I also want GrapheneOS or something similar. Can’t have it all…

Bump for an update. What did you ultimately do?

I’m looking for a similar solution

This process sounds very flexible. Got a link about how to set this up?

I’d also like to learn how to do this but it seems like a steep learning curve for a non-expert user. If you have any resources to share to learn this kung fu, please post

I’ve tried a few times to use Timeshift to restore to a new disk. Once it worked without any issue. This last time it did not and I suspect grub just needs to be rebuilt. I’ve read that it is always possible but Timeshift certainly doesn’t make it easy in every case

I do something similar but my live USB is just bootable Clonezilla. I’d like to hear more about why you use a live Ubuntu ssd.

Regarding Timeshift on btrfs, is the idea that Timeshift makes it easier to backup to a different disk versus using Snapper?

I’m also on btrfs and miss the wonders of Macrium Reflect. For now, in addition to Snapper, I’ve been using Clonezilla to make a disk image on occassion. I’m in the process of figuring out something like Vorta to replace that process.

I remember reading a lot this past year about Mozilla fretting about their market share and trying to figure out how to grow their user base. Did I hallucinate that? Cuz their actions lately appear to be driving users away. Are they taking notes from Google or is there some other MBA making these brilliant changes?

I had bad experiences with Seagate between 2002 and 2009. Multiple, sudden, premature drive failures under ideal operating conditions. I haven’t bought a Seagate drive in over 10 years.

WD enterprise grade hardware is still good for me, as of 2 years ago. Their customer service sucks but the hardware is still good

In general I tend to go for Toshiba or Hitachi (rebranded to a different name if I recall…) if I have a preference. I have some really old drives like 15+ years old still chugging along.

Give me an open source solution that can import notebooks from OneNote and I’m sold!

If the OP has a Timeshift backup, is it also possible to restore one of those backups to the new 1 TB drive?