How are you wasting your time doing nerd stuff today?

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Aka geek stuff your “normal” friends wouldn’t understand. I figured we could make this an ongoing thread for stuff like this. How we waste our own time changing configurations for whatever reason we dream up mostly just to spend time on computer. :nerd_face:

This is a text I just sent my Luddite friend. :joy:

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I’m backing up my Windows 11 VM and a bunch of app’s config data from my Kubuntu install. It’s agonizingly slow. In hindsight, I should’ve used my external SSD instead of a thumb drive the write speeds are just ridiculous.

I’ll likely be using Windows a little more for Parsec. I want to give it a little more hard drive space than the anemic 100GB I originally set it up with mostly so I can install WSL plus a bunch of (Windows native) FOSS apps I regularly but still have breathing room.

I’m only working with 512GB on the laptop. Since my partition scheme isn’t the most sane as I didn’t plan on needing to resize, My plan is:

  • Boot into my Windows 11 ISO with Ventoy and launch the recovery environment to restore the Windows MBR.
  • Reboot into Windows and use its partition editor to nuke my Kubuntu partitions.
  • Expand Windows partition.
  • Reboot and reinstall Kubuntu into the remaining space.

I realize I could like avoid the Kubuntu reinstall by using Gparted Live or something like that but since my /boot/efi is sitting in a 2GB partition between Window’s 100GB NTFS partition and Kubuntu’s EXT4 partition I’m afraid of major breakage and getting stuck having to reinstall both Windows and Kubuntu. Installing and updating Windows is to painful! :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Any ideas how to partition in the future so things are easier if need be? Don’t forget Windows randomly sticks a recovery partition that often throws a wrench using the disk partitions logically.

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Yesterday, after a golf tournament, I patched some servers.

Today, I listened to an old American Top 40 countdown while mowing lawn. Quite often that’s a podcast rather than music, like Linux Unplugged. Then I scripted some log analysis to see what was popular on a website.

Now, watching some volleyball on TV while surfing It’s Foss.

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Leave some space between Win and your EFI partition

With gparted you should be abke to shrink Kubuntu partition, move the EFI partition , then expand Win.

I rarely use desktop during the day … use Android tablet, which I use like a laptop. My desktop exercise after tea at night is mostly my current project …, at moment current project is trying to understand lmm algorithms.
I do have phases of reconfiguring my setup, updates, and backups.

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I don’t use Windows, but ran across the info that the activation key is stored on the motherboard (MB). I brought my last desktop off e-bay with no OS installed some time ago.

I install Mint as my daily OS and MX as a guest OS onto the desktop. So I wonder,
is the Win key on my desktop. I search and found a Linux command to show if there was one and lo and behold there was one.

So even tho I don’t use Win, I wasted my time moving some stuff around and installed Win 11 to see if it would activate And yes, it did.

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