on arch btw.

foobaz@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 367 points –
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Does your Windows do this? *doesn't crash*

But seriously, yesterday I cloned my main partition to a new laptop into an LVM volume on LUKS. Because I did not have any way of putting the new NVMe and old SATA SSD into one machine, I just used netcat over an ad hoc network.

nc -l 10000 > /dev/main/root

on the new Laptop and

cat /dev/sda3 | nc 10.31.69.1 10000 -q 0

on the old one. Worked perfectly. Now do that on Windows with builtin tools in live boots.

Next time you could even add gzip or some other compression and save yourself a bit of time and bandwidth.

The rate was around 100MB/s. So I think the bottleneck was probably the read/write speeds of the SSDs, considering I have ~900Mbit/s down from speedtest.net, and this setup removed every hop except the old and new Laptops Gigabit Lan Port and the Gigabit patch cable between them. But with larger files/partitions over the internet this would probably help

Now do that on Windows with builtin tools in live boots

More like do that in Windows with any tools. It doesn't like being moved to different hardware one bit.

I just noticed I did not fully expand the fs on the target machine after shrinking it on the source machine to be sure it fits. No problem, growing ext4 file systems with resize2fs (indirect dependency of linux and base) works on mounted fs' too, the Kernel just needs to be newer than 2.6 (so since 2003).
Took less than 1 second and works flawlessly, live. Conkys fs_free just jumped from 20 to 76. Still time to clear my caches.

The only problems with my Arch install were

  • /etc/fstab, which I forgot about because I didn't read the whole install article again
  • custom configs (notable conky) because i8k is not available and all interfaces changed

Btw detected

I'd guess many distros would've had errors with preinstalled and configured helpers. Debugging them would be a pain

Gentoo, LFS, Arch etc. are installed manually, so one typically knows their system very well, including packages and configs they might have to hard configure interfaces etc. in

Last time I tried to mess with Windows partition I tried to expand it to merge free space in my C:\ drive, but I couldn't do that because Windows put the recovery partition in the middle, with no permission to remove it. Had to jump through a million hoops to get Windows to remove it.

I mean sure, Windows is easier in many ways. Not partition management. Anything but that. What a pain.

Ran into that a few years ago. I think I ended up fixing it by booting linux off a flash drive and moving the partitions around in that. It wasn't to difficult after I just gave up trying to do it in Windows. Such a stupid problem.

I think I see a theme here. Doing fun normie stuff on iOS/ipadOS is easy. Doing technical stuff is usually completely impossible.

Doing technical stuff on Linux is easy as long as you know what you’re doing. Doing popular normie things on Linux is a bit hit-or-miss. Some things work perfectly, but other things are a royal pita.

Windows seems to be in between the two extremes in more than one regard. Microsoft seems to be working to find some sort of compromise in these things.