Usually with most Linux distributions you can just make a tarball of the entire system (don’t forget the p to preserve ownership,…) and unpack it to a new partition, install the boot loader again and it should work on a new system, as long as the kernel does work with the hardware on the new system. Alternatively you can reinstall and keep your home directory to keep all your user config.
You could likely use dd or clonezilla to create a duplicate of your boot drive and boot your laptop right from that, but that’s not quite what you’re after.
There are some distros lately that use a declarative config file to set the whole thing up that I think is much more what you have in mind. The big ones that come up a lot are nixOS and Fedora Silverblue. Maybe one of those systems would be to your liking.
dd duplicates directories. It’s a terminal app. Built into all Linux distros. For more details, do a man dd in a terminal session. Clonezilla is a distro that runs a live system from USB or DVD which lets you backup and restore entire systems. Both are powerful, but have a learning curve.
I think you could install your system using a generic kernel, package it up as ISO and just boot it on basically any other machine with the same architecture. Proprietary bits like NVidia driver and firmware could pose a problem.
That’s basically what a live USB is.
I find that even if you get a touch primary device, make sure to get one with a keyboard, Ubuntu, Fedora, doesn’t matter, KDE, Gnome doesn’t matter, the touch only experience on linux is simply not great. Make extra sure to get the keyboard with it if its optional.
+1 have been trying to make a Linux tablet work. Gnome is alright but it’s got a crap CPU and 2gb of ram and nothing lightweight has good touch support annoyingly
I am, very hesitantly, optimistic for the new smithay based compositors. Cosmic doesn’t have touch support yet, but it’s super light weight, I get better perf then I do even with KDE. I plan on swapping to it full time on my tablet when it gets touch support. (and when some touch friendly gui stuff is available). you also have catacomb which is an actual mobile compositor. Very promising stuff, but still very far out
I was trying things along the lines of hyprland, sway and i3. I have this idea in my head that a touch screen tiling WM would work really well (from what I’ve seen that’s what people love so much about the iPad nowadays anyway)
Hyprland has something called hyprgrass I think which enables touchscreen gestures, still in the process of figuring out how to install that in NixOS though. (it’s got a nix.flake but it’s not in nixpkgs and I’m still unsure of how to install flakes to a traditional configuration.nix setup)
You could probably look into something like paperwm or Niri, I think scrollable window managers have a lot of potential to be a novel but good touch experience
EDIT: Im not sure if niri support touch, I havent tested it, but I think i might actually try it myself when I get the chance now
I put Ubuntu on a handful of Surface Pros a couple years ago for work, and while the process wasn’t horrible, I was wishing for something with more native support the whole time. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one.
It’s been awhile and I haven’t tried to latest hardware, but I’m sure it’s still doable. The process wasn’t terrible, just a few extra steps to add compatibility for some of the devices.
I preordered on announcement day, I expect it’ll arrive December. I am excited for it to replace my 12" iPad pro. The 3:2 screen is perfect for reading and office app work.
From a developer’s standpoint, one of the bigger pain points of Wayland is window embedding.
If you want to embed from an external process, the only way to do this is to have your application expose its own Wayland compositor and then have the embedded process use that Wayland compositor. No one has made a library for this as of yet.
If you want to embed from the same process, it shouldn’t be too difficult; you just need a wl_subsurface. However, this doesn’t work too well with most GUI toolkits.
Wayland is just radically different from every other windowing API, and I’m hoping that the GUI toolkits can adapt.
I use NixOS but I don’t bother with automatic deployment or even automatic formatting. I don’t feel it’s necessary in a homelab setting as hardware failure rarely happens at such small scale and the manual steps left aren’t that significant.
This kind of integration testing is best left up to the individual distros. Same as the integration (as in: packaging) itself.
Distros don’t want your binary package, they want your source code, build instructions and a build system that won’t make them cry. Some distros even explicitly disallow re-packaging external binary distributions.
As a distro maintainer, I appreciate your wish to do QA on all the distros but that’s just too much work. You focus on making your software better, we focus on making it work with the rest of the software ecosystem.
Providing a package for one or two distros (i.e. your favourite one) is good practice to ensure your software can be reasonably packaged but it’s not the primary way your users should receive your package in the traditional Linux distro model.
Additionally, you might want to package your software for one of the cross-distro package managers such as Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, Nix, Guix, distri or homebrew. This can serve distro maintainers as a point of reference; showing how it is intended to work so they can compare their packaging effort. If there’s some bug present in the distro package but not the cross-distro package, that’s a good sign the issue lies in the distro packaging for example.
Again, don’t put much time in this. Focus on your app.
Open.qa it is an OpenSUSE tool but it can be used to auto test installs of any OS/software. Their open build service also automates and tests package building
Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.
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