If you like fedora as a base, you can install the Gnome version of fedora and install the Pop Shell. It has autotiling that you can turn on and off while you get used to it if you want. Its what I run on Nobara and it works perfectly fine for me.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

Maybe not that much more complicated, but it does give a less experienced user a lot more opportunities to make a mistake that could result in data loss or just a computer that suddenly decides not to boot Linux anymore since a Windows update broke grub.

The most important thing to do is backup your data to an external drive. Unless you are planning on dual booting (much more complicated) you will be wiping out the entire drive that has windows on it when you install Linux.

This guide goes through the whole installation process.

Octoprint is what I use. Slicing is probably the thing it woukd be least good at but all the rest is good. And theres an api to write plugins for if youre into that sort of thing.

I haven’t done any work for the military but i can say that all the legacy systems I’ve worked on were because the specific software they need was written only for Windows 98 and the developer or company that created it is long gone. Keeping it going is a chore but switching to literally anything else is out of the question.

I could see for military applications that having the known quantity of a working piece of software that isn’t changing anymore and can be swapped as an entire unit is an advantage, especially if it doesn’t touch the internet in any capacity. But eventually you run out of people who know what to do if any changes need to be made.

There are several things like that in Fedora, which is already a good reason not to recommend it to first timers. They most likely won’t know or care about nonfree codecs, they will just see a broken machine. Linux Mint understands that as a use case and has a “magic make it work” checkbox during install.

That all being said, I run Nobara and love it, but i wouldn’t recommend it for new people.

You are correct that this is technically in code and would protect against shock hazards in a neutral error situation but you also get the opportunity for the outlet to pop during the day when nobody is home and the battery to die.

We had a situation in our old house where someone who was technically correct but didn’t think it through had a gfci outlet upstream of the refrigerator outlet. Thankfully it popped while someone was home and we got everything corrected before we lost everything in the fridge.

They would most likely still have to disable secure boot.

1. The order doesnt matter as long as they are the same drives, you dont have a usb dock or raid card in front of them (ie sata/sas/nvme only)and you have enough of them to rebuild the array. Ideally all of them but in a dire situation you can rebuild based on 2 out of 3 of a Raid Z1

2. You can do that, you shouldn’t but you can. I’ve done something similar before in a nasty recovery situation and it worked but don’t do it unless you have no other option. I highly recommend just downloading the config file from your current truenas box and importing it into a fresh install on a proper drive on your new machine.

3. Sort of already mentioned it but you can take your drives, plug them into your new machine. Install a fresh Truenas scale and then just import the config file from your current setup and you should be off to the races. Your main gotcha is if the pool is encrypted. If you lose access to the key you are donezo forever. If not, the import has always been pretty straightforward and ive never had any issues with it.

4. Lots of people virtualize truenas and lots of people virtualize firewalls too. To me, the ungodly amount of stupid edge cases, especially with consumer hardware that break hardware passthrough on disks (which truenas/zfs needs to work properly) is never worth it.

That would lower the barrier to entry significantly. It doesn’t address the issues with the bios but someone mildly adventurous would have a much easier time going forward.

I think something like that would have to be sponsored by and maintained by a big distro though. I’m afraid if it was a community effort the amount of bikeshedding would stop it before it even began.

Linux pre installed is the only way for most people to use it I’m afraid.

Fedora does btrfs snapshots on boot also, which is such a great feature that I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t copied it for Windows.

This is definitely the case. And by the time someone is willing to experiment with their PC its so old that the experience with Linux is hampered by the older hardware.

Definitely. I can genuinely say that the autotiling in PopOS completely changed my workflow for the better.

Absolutely. If Linux was pre installed that’s what people would use. Its the switching to Linux from something else that proves so complicated.

Mostly just so they know which boot device to pick.

Admittedly that’s probably not necessary or the least of someone’s issues.

God i wish. And most everyone here could install a new operating system in about 20 minutes. But nobody else is going to because the learning curve for a regular user to install an os is basically perpendicular. Even if they had a linux installer already on a flash drive.

Oh just boot into the bios and find the option to boot for a flash drive and then boom installed.

Which requires a user to know, What a bios is

What booting means

What boot options mean

What the model of their flash drive is

What button on their keyboard they need to press to get to the bios

What secure boot is

Where they need to go to turn off secure boot

How and where to back up their important files

What a disk partition is

How to reverse the changes made to the bios so that it doesn’t boot to usb by default.

And that’s assuming they know why they want a different OS, why they care and that they know about Linux in the first place.

Most people dont and never will. All you can do is install Linux for the ones you like the most and say a prayer to your favorite deity for the rest.

I actually run mine in a 12 year old castoff Thinkpad. 4 GB ram total. More than enough to run it because I run a DNS server, a dashboard and a speedtest server on the same machine.

There’s a toggle

Becomes

There’s a toggle but we moved it deep into a sub menu

Becomes

If you toggle it off it also breaks a lot of other things you want to have

Becomes

Toggle it off if you want but it’s still going to run in the background

Until the EU sues and forces them to have an option to actually remove it.

I can’t wait. As long as they keep the autotiling feature working as well as it does now I’m down.