if you’re on fedora, your file system is btrfs. that one has subvolumes, think partitions as folders that you don’t hafta pre-size.

so what you can do is install this endeavour thing in its own subvolume; presently you got root (fedora) and home. so you install the new os in /newroot, mount it at / and mount the existing home in its /home.

you don’t mount the old root at all, so fedora is ready and waiting when you grow tired of the new toy, and all your shit is there, no need to backup, restore, miss something etc.

the windows partition is easily taken care of, just format it as btrfs and add it to the existing file system.

this wipe and reinstall way isn’t a thing over here, as it’s rarely needed. good luck!

maybe open with what this is, first time I heard of it. to anyone similarly clueless, that’s a proxy for other people to use that can’t get at Signal’s servers because it’s blocked in their country or sumsuch.

in nginx you set up a proxy, like mysignalproxy.net:80 gets proxy_pass to your internal network’s 172.16.12.34:980 and the same for 443

the simplest config is thus:

server {
    listen 80 http;

    server_name mysignalproxy.net;

    proxy_pass http://172.16.12.34:980/;

    proxy_pass_request_headers on;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    etc

dogdamn, that thing is still alive… forgot about that monstrosity. condolences to everyone who has to put up with that snapcrap.

aside from it being the futo thing, I don’t think it has an android sender and it was incompatible with anything I tried last time.

I’ve been using macast for the past 5-6 years and I’ve been looking for a replacement but none seems to pop up. the thing @Ephera@lemmy.ml mentioned looks interesting, might try to recreate.

anyhow, you let it run on your media-PC and you send it stuff from your phone - video urls (not limited to youtube), actual video files, since it’s a DLNA sink you can connect jellyfin clients to it, etc. on your phone you need allcast (not on the play store no more, get an archived apk from apkmirror or sumsuch). behind the scenes it uses yt-dlp and mpv to play back the video, full screen if you set it up so.

it mostly works fine, needs the occasional restart when it ran too long and it’s not aware of already playing stuff, like if there’s jellyfin-media-player already playing something, it would be cool if it would pause it and resume after video.

I feel this should be a functionality of JMP, doesn’t seem that hard to implement it.

I mean dude, come on. the ref to mbpr was to illustrate the fragility of the things - did you count the busted screens that aren’t due to drops? the video was to illustrate the problem with soldered on SSDs, how apple got a multitude of different suppliers (and whose quality varies wildly) and how the TBW’s for those devices are incongruent with normal use on other platforms - and those you can simply swap out.

I’m arguing people shouldn’t buy 5-year old 8gig devices for $300+, you’re advocating for $1K+ machines that are marginally better and not even that when you consider the subject of this post, running linux on it. give it a rest already, you’re not proving anything.

one of us lacks reading comprehension. I’m specifically talking about bying used, 5-year old, 8gig laptops, that had excessive SSD wear and are in addition to that expensive and super-fragile.

if you don’t have direct experiences with those things dying en masse, you can visit the site we all hate and their r/macbookrepair subthing and skim over just one week’s worth of posts. then you can click on any of the posts or videos discussing SSDs dying, like this one: https://youtu.be/MZuv4TIjk-I

literally the first sentence is “don’t get them to run asahi”. wasn’t a dig at apple, macbooks, macOS, etc.

the stuff you’re suggesting (max/pro) is insanely expensive and also not the subject of my comment.

I’m sure the audience here don’t need this, but just in case a caution to not get one of these things (M1/M2) in order to run asahi. if you get a handmedown or sumsuch, great, have at it, but don’t buy them 2nd hand however great the deal is - and it’s rarely great; for that kind of money you can get a vastly superior thinkpad/elitebook/latitude that you can upgrade RAM and storage and you can service it with a nail clipper.

those things predominantly have only 8 GB and that RAM is shared with graphics. not only is that not enough for any reasonable activity, that config caused the system to use the SSD’s swap excessively; they routinely have insane TBW numbers. that in turn causes the soldered-on SSD chips to give out, netting you a brick. when you add the butterfly-fragile screens that bust from misplaced specks of dust, that purchase is anything but an investment.

I had a coupla folks in my orbit who tried the thing from the 1st paragraph, all like “watch this!” and within a coupla weeks they were back at their thinkpads and pre-T2 macbooks.

all the fascist bullshit aside, this is a project from a dude that was a decades long apple fanboy and discovered linux like yesterday has zero clue on how to do things well because he’s a Maverick Trailblazer and what do the little people know this is the way and whatnot so I guess yeah we is back at the fascist thing and yeah stay away.

can’t recommend it enough, saner defaults, way smoother, mucho easier to work with than postmarketOS. wish I hadn’t bricked my 6T, apparently can’t resurrect it now without windows which I ain’t got…

that clown? pass.

I do a custom install with systemd-boot where i have one 2 GB EFI partition that’s mounted at /boot; used to be at /efi but it bothered me I can’t tab-complete /etc. I’ve been wanting to give UKI a go but can’t get around to it.

very cool.

was looking for something similar, to repurpose a Macbook Pro 17 from 2006; 32-bit EFI and Radeon X1600, plently of issues running a semi-modern distro, but maybe as an X11 terminal for my headless server… but I just start thinking about it and give up, needs way too much stuff done.

here’s why you’re doing beginners a disservice with Mint.

it’s an X11 distro. no big deal if you’re installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.

if it’s a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn’t in Cinnamon’s camp.

if it’s a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.

if you’re an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.

there’s basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go “hmm, that’s interesting. let’s try…” regardless if it’s a lazy afternoon or they’re under heavy artillery fire… and then there are those that invariably go “oh what the fuck now!?”

if you’re in the latter camp, you have one option and that’s Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it “just works” in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don’t need additional ones.

when you’ve been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what’s what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.

but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.

the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody’s not using this!?

but then I needed a piece of software that wasn’t available and flatpak wouldn’t work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there’s this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I’m done…

not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core…I can’t imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that’s 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.

not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.

so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.

to each his own, but I can’t stand this clown. he desperately wants to come off as this wise, cranky, tell-it-like-it-is one-of-the-guys, but the often cretinous takes permeating his works are off-putting. the evil elites in charge of opensource not thinking about people with mech drives in 2024, the abject “horror” that’s systemd, his “helpful” notes on bugs in five year old software, for my money the dude can get bent.

so when he likes something it immediately prompts me to do the inverse; not that it’s needed in the case of MX.

good start, but in the next iteration (as you’re the dabbler) try to replace tailscale with wireguard. the majority of that stack is not needed for your scenario, and you’ll also not dick around with authentication and such.

eons ago I heard and internalised an awesome phrase: “don’t analyze the problem - solve it”.

in that vein, install it yourself and ship the laptop to him. don’t matter what it cost, it’s not like it’s gonna bankrupt you and it’s not like you’re gonna do this multiple times per year.

you’re 100% in control of everything and that’s the next best thing to being there and doing it for yourself. you’re gonna figure out how to remotely do half of the things you mention across CGNATs and whatnot? I am sure you got better things to do; I know dad has.