I’ve had similar experiences moving to Linux on various machines. I don’t yet understand the pattern. Why do some distros work better on some machines than others?

I have an original MS Surface Pro. Ubuntu works best on it, imo.

I have a 10 year old Asus laptop that has all kinds of seemingly random issues - currently on Mint but about to migrate to OpenSuse.

I have a 4 year old Dell laptop and it likes Garuda the best.

Go figure.

I love Ventoy for this reason. I can try 8 different distros till I find one that works best on a particular machine.

This process sounds very flexible. Got a link about how to set this up?

I’d also like to learn how to do this but it seems like a steep learning curve for a non-expert user. If you have any resources to share to learn this kung fu, please post

I’ve tried a few times to use Timeshift to restore to a new disk. Once it worked without any issue. This last time it did not and I suspect grub just needs to be rebuilt. I’ve read that it is always possible but Timeshift certainly doesn’t make it easy in every case

I do something similar but my live USB is just bootable Clonezilla. I’d like to hear more about why you use a live Ubuntu ssd.

Regarding Timeshift on btrfs, is the idea that Timeshift makes it easier to backup to a different disk versus using Snapper?

I’m also on btrfs and miss the wonders of Macrium Reflect. For now, in addition to Snapper, I’ve been using Clonezilla to make a disk image on occassion. I’m in the process of figuring out something like Vorta to replace that process.

I remember reading a lot this past year about Mozilla fretting about their market share and trying to figure out how to grow their user base. Did I hallucinate that? Cuz their actions lately appear to be driving users away. Are they taking notes from Google or is there some other MBA making these brilliant changes?

I had bad experiences with Seagate between 2002 and 2009. Multiple, sudden, premature drive failures under ideal operating conditions. I haven’t bought a Seagate drive in over 10 years.

WD enterprise grade hardware is still good for me, as of 2 years ago. Their customer service sucks but the hardware is still good

In general I tend to go for Toshiba or Hitachi (rebranded to a different name if I recall…) if I have a preference. I have some really old drives like 15+ years old still chugging along.

Give me an open source solution that can import notebooks from OneNote and I’m sold!

If the OP has a Timeshift backup, is it also possible to restore one of those backups to the new 1 TB drive?