I would rather tinker to be honest, I am that kind of a person, but currently, my family (kid) needs me. He’s young and needs guidance, playing, attention, etc. That is more important than tinkering with tech IMO.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that there’s many ways of doing the same thing and none is “the correct and only way”. They should learn to think critically, navigate unfamiliar user interfaces, learn some more general concepts and connect the dots on how things work, and that computers are logical machines, they don’t just do random things because they’re weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit them immediately.
This will come gradually. First, show him one way of doing things, let it sink in, let him get comfortable with it, then say “you know, you could do that in another way as well 😉”. I bet he’ll start asking you if there are other ways as well in no time 😂.
Yeah, but the kid has to be older, 12 is too young for that IMO.
Still, a Linux install with a DE will do nicely. He wants to do this and this, but there is no GUI for it, tell him to open up the terminal and type in the following commands, see what happens after you hit Enter… it always brings a smile, even with adults ☺️, they feel like they’re hackers or something 😂.
Then they usually wanna know what each of the commands and options do, and this is where I know I have a great student ☺️.
It was oiled up, so not much sound comming from there, except the occasional “shlup, shlup”… my mom was kinda weird though, she kept moaning our dog’s name for some reason 🤔.
I seriosly think that a psychologist or a therapist would be one of the few jobs that will never get replaced by AI… or at least not in the near future (10 years or so).
OK, then here’s what you do. Wipe the NVME, install your main OS on it. Boot to it, it should read the SATA drive. Mount it, copy whatever you need from it to the NVME drive. Then wipe the SATA drive (dd or any other program of your choice). Install your second OS on the SATA drive, but skip installing the bootloader. Reboot, boot to your man OS, set grub to search for other installed OSes on the laptop, update grub. The second OS should appear in grub’s menu.
If the data on the SATA drive is bigger than what the NVME can take, use BTRFS with compression (zstd=10 should do it, after the copy, you can drop the compression to 5 for better performance) on the main OS. It will compress binaries or plain text/document files quite nicely. Media, not so much, but it will cut down a few % off it.
Also, when you update the kernel on the second OS, grub won’t detect that. You have to manually switch to the new kernel, but from the main OS. Also, removing old kernels on the second OS will become more complicated, since there is no bootloader installed for it.
You’ve messed up partitioning and EFI partitions. There are leftovers from Debian and Windows. Wipe both drives, star fresh. Make one EFI partition on the NVME drive, 512MB, and use the rest for the main OS. Use the entire SATA drive for the other boot option (no need for EFI partition on that one). When installing the second OS, skip the bootloader install. Boot into the main OS, set grub to search for other OSes installed on the laptop and update grub afterwards. The second OS should appear in grub’s menu.