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Summary: I'm trying to back up a failing harddisk and bring programs over to a new system. I'd also like to transition off Windows. I'm hoping my fellow Soylentils can share their experiences and help ease the transition. I realize I'm probably not the only person who may be looking to do such things, so I'm hoping that the replies will be helpful to someone who later comes upon this story.
Background: I have a 10-year-old HP laptop with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ running Windows XP/SP3 with an 80 GB hard disk Over the past 10 years I've installed well over 100 programs and done countless tweaks and modifications to their defaults. Thanks to the generosity of a kind friend, I'm getting a Dell Latitude with a fresh install of Win 7 Pro which has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz and a 500 GB hard disk.
Goal: Full-disk backups of both systems and as-painless-as-possible installation of programs on the new system. Ultimately transition off Windows to a Linux/BSD distro.
Challenges: When I run SMART on the HP's 80 GB disk, it reports "Prefailure" for: "Raw Read Error Rate", "Spin Up Time", "Reallocated Sector Count", "Seek Error Rate", and "Spin Retry Count." A couple years ago, I tried doing a full-disk backup. In preparation, I did a CHKDSK /R to relocate bad sectors and fix any other errors. Then I ran a Live CD version of Clonezilla (2.0.1-5-i486) to backup the disk to an external USB hard disk; it happily chewed along for several hours until it hit a disk error and then just stopped. I'd like to use something which is more determined to retry challenged sectors and not die on any errors — ideally it would report details on any non-recoverable sectors, etc.
As for installing my old programs on the new machine, I surely miss the pre-registry days when one could just zip up a directory on one machine, unzip it on another, and you were good to go! Example: I use Pale Moon as my browser. I've set customizations for fonts, character sets, etc. as well as having updated the internal spelling dictionary. What is the easiest way to bring the program over to the new system? Similarly, how would I bring over such programs as: Mozilla Thunderbird, PuTTY, HexChat, and VLC?
Lastly: I'd like to get off the Windows merry-go-round. I have considerable experience in using Unix userland commands (ls, find, gawk, sed, etc.) but negligible experience in installing Linux/BSD/etc. The new box has sufficient memory (6 GB) that I could conceivably run Windows in a VM. I've never done that on a PC before. (Many years ago I worked at IBM testing their VM operating system, so I'm familiar with the concepts.) So, I'm open to folks' experience on how to go about doing a P2V (physical to virtual) of the new system. Based on what I've read, I'd like to stay away from systemd, so that strikes out a few of the selections mentioned in: What Distro Do Soylentils Use? What has your experience been? What do you recommend?
I know there's probably something I don't know; what else should I be asking? What problems should I watch out for?
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday July 09 2015, @08:57PM
I get a lot of the arguments against SystemD. I really do. I get why it bends people out of shape as a concept. I get why it could be the thin edge of an increasingly large wedge.
But coming in as a non-expert, making a decision on which distro to use based on a second-hand assessment of how something you're unlikely to directly interact with has been architected internally is a poor basis for making a decision.
It's like buying a new car and ruling out every car that uses a Single-Overhead Cam or Overhead Valve valvetrain because you've read that Dual-Overhead Cam valvetrains are more efficient. It might be accurate, it might even be one important factor in how reliable or efficient the car is. But (especially if you don't really understand it), it's not really the best starting point for making a decision. There are more important factors that you WILL notice regularly.
Many of the most popular, best supported, and most user friendly distros use SystemD. Sorry, but it's true.
Ruling out Ububtu as an option because it uses SystemD, or Mint because it's likely to move to SystemD in the future, is not necessarily doing yourself any favors.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Friday July 10 2015, @05:12AM
I judge a distro as to how healthy it is by all sorts of factors, and SystemD is one of those factors. Whether you love or hate SystemD, that program can be a great indicator as to whether a distro is right for you or not. If you hate SystemD and the distro has it, then the philosophy of the maintainers are differing from yours. If you love it and the distro has it, then your philosophy is more in line with the maintainers. If you don't care, then it isn't a factor for you.
I think if you truly understand the arguments of SystemD and still don't think it matters, then you don't understand the arguments. It has caused a lot of people to jump off distros. The idea that people have left distros and taken their knowledge with them weakens the distro's position. Car analogy? The new car model made a change from last year and now people are taking sides on that position. The arguments indicate a more unstable environment that could undermine the value of the car in the long run. That is something to take note of and factor in to your decision when choosing a distro. Regardless of your feelings or my feelings of SystemD, it left a pretty powerful shockwave in the community that will last for a long time. For many people, it is a major philosophical choice that indicates where the distro is headed in the future.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NCommander on Friday July 10 2015, @06:44AM
systemd is fine, and perhaps appropriate for desktops where responsiveness and tight integration are good things. In such an environment, while it chafts me, I have had no negative experiences. In a server based environment trying to debug crud, it gets in the way, is amazingly unhelpful in determining why your unit files failed, *and* hides error messages due to STDERR being considered unimportant.
Still always moving