I can recommend Debian or Fedora. They are both mature distros that are pretty easy to install and generally work well with minimal fuss and are easy to maintain. I often see Linux Mint recommend, including in this thread. I’ve never used it so I can’t speak to it. But I have every reason to believe it’s a solid choice.

As for transfer process, since you mention using spare disks, NTFS filesystems are supported and you may be able to just copy files off of them. I don’t know if bitlocker is supported.

Fine points. And I am considering that simplicity might be worth it. Except for:

Another fix might be moving towards software that doesn’t require the capacity to reverse updates frequently.

Totally solid advice, but I love my rolling release distro though. So for the time being I’m willing to accept the associated risk.

Your comment as well as @stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net were really food for thought for me. stupid_asshole69 advising against, and yours as a cautionary tale.

This would be a complex stack to accomplish my goal. It occurs to me that it’d be mdadm (raid 1) > LUKS > btrfs since btrfs can’t do encryption which is right in the middle of that stack, so I couldn’t use it’s raid 1 functionality. If any of those pieces break, all the protection they would have otherwise provided me goes out the window.

And I’m not really worried about losing data. I already backup my personal files and most of my configs. The appeal with this kind of setup is the data redundancy and fairly quick recovery. But a partition clone like what saved you also works pretty well for that purpose. I don’t know what I’ll do just yet, but definitely taking all that in to consideration.

I wasn’t familiar with timeshift so I took a look at it. My primary use case for snapshots is to take one before updates. So I can load from the snapshot if there’s issues. It doesn’t look like using it with ext4 would fulfill this use-case. But it looks like it also supports btrfs snapshots so could be useful as a UI to configure that.

Hearing roughly a decade of successful use, especially on systems with constrained resources, certainly makes me lean further towards btrfs.

its RAID ≠ 0/1/10 are buggy, but 0/1/10 are considered reliable.

btrfs has been solid and done everything I could want. It was a huge upgrade from mdadm and lvm

@ikidd@lemmy.world said that btrfs is poor at software RAID. I’ll do a little research in to how it fares for RAID 1 vs mdadm. I don’t see any reason I couldn’t do mdadm>luks>btrfs if that’s the better choice. But if btrfs is reliable and with comparable performance, I’d certainly rather do that.

It’s the shits at software RAID, but that’s rarely a thing on a workstation.

I am using a RAID 1 mirror over two disks. So that’s good to know. I’ll do a little research and see if it’s better to let mdadm handle that.

Look at btrfs-assistant for adminstration. That’s what Fedora ships with, I think it uses Snapper in the backend.

Doesn’t look like that’s in the void repo. But that’s ok, I don’t mind learning the command line tools.

I don’t know specifically about a medical lab tech program. But I do know about clinical software in general. It is by and large proprietary Widows software. Seems like something you may encounter. But said software could be delivered via Citrix, which does have a Linux client.

NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.

Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.

Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what’s installed.

Void for desktop/laptop. These are the things I like about it.

• Rolling release
• Initial installation is minimal, and doesn’t foist a specific DE or other unessential software on me.
• No systemd
• Nothing similar to Arch’s AUR. I know a lot of people love it, but I do not. I mention as the distros are similar.

Debian for my server. But I plan to migrate to Devuan.

• Stable and well tested
• Huge package selection
• Pretty ubiquitously supported. If for whatever reason what you want to run isn’t in the repo, .deb packages and apt repos are often available.
• Minimal installation available.

Best I can tell post blur, those posts are marked NSFW. You can choose to hide those posts. Assuming you’re signed in anyway, I’m not familiar enough with that interface to tell.

+1 for installing Arch. If you have enough knowledge of Linux to understand what Arch is and why it is, comparatively, a more involved installation. Then you’re probably ready to install it. As was mentioned in another content, long as you know the basics, it’s not as hard as you might think. Also as suggested in another comment installing in a VM or spare hardware is good practice.

As for learning, take the time to understand the commands you’re copy/pasting. Read the man page, see what the flags you’re pasting in to. That might sound daunting at first, and you might not always be able to completely wrap you’re head around it. But you’ll learn more and more over time.