Hi everyone!

I’m a happy Gnome user on Fedora 38 on my Surface Go 1. Still, as I’m not an experienced Linux user, I’d want to discover some other distros and some other DE like KDE.

I’m planning on installing a distro with KDE on Gnome Boxes, but I wanted to know if there was a way to export it and make it a real OS (no VM) at one point.

To get to the point where I had my perfect workstation installation, it took me quite some time and I wouldn’t want to waste my time creating my perfect VM and not make it real at one point.

I don’t know if it could be done by cloning my virtual disk with Clonezilla for instance.

I’m sorry if my question ain’t clear, it’s just that I may not have the right vocabulary to talk about such things.

  • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
    29•8 months ago

    It’s not that difficult do virtual > physical migrations in Linux. Linux is inherently portable, thanks to the kernel, you don’t need to worry about stuff like drivers, at least for drivers which are part of the kernel (so not counting proprietary nVidia drivers - which you wouldn’t be using in a VM anyways.)

    Roughly, the process would go like this:

    1. Use qemu-img convert to convert your virtual disk to a raw image format
    2. Use dd to write the image to your physical disk
    3. Use gparted to resize/expand partitions on the disk as required
    4. Examine the disk using fdisk/blkid to see which device node your disk is using (eg /dev/nvme0n2 etc), then mount the new root volume and edit the fstab to the correct disk paths if required
    5. Chroot into the disk and reinstall your bootloader (GRUB or systemd-boot etc). The process for this will vary based on your bootloader, and your distro. Usually most distros should have some wiki or documentation on how to repair GRUB or w/e from chroot.
    6. Boot from the new disk and test. You may need to manually add an entry to your UEFI boot entries, if it’s not showing up as an option in your UEFI boot menu.
    7. You may need to potentially install some extra stuff, for instance, you may need to install the Vulkan driver package for your GPU, maybe the CPU microcode package etc.

    This is all of course, assuming you’re migrating to a dedicated hard drive and you’re only going to be using a single OS. On the other hand, if you’re migrating on to an existing disk (dual-booting) the process would be a bit different - instead of dding the entire image, you’d use losetup and mount your raw disk image as a loop device, then use something like clonezilla or GParted to copy over only specific partitions excluding the ESP. After that, the rest of the process should be similar to the above, except you won’t need to reinstall your bootloader - but you may need to update it’s config to detect the new OS.

    I’ve not accounted for complex setups btw, such as using LUKS or LVM. But the process still remains roughly the same, you’ll just need a few additional commands to decrypt the partition before you copy them over.

    In saying that, it may be easier to just reinstall the distro fresh on your real hardware. There are scripts out there to export your dotfiles and package lists, to make the migration easier.

    • Dariusmiles2123OPEnglish
      3•8 months ago

      Thanks for the detailed answer.

      It sounds way too complicated for me so I’ll probably give it a try in a VM and then install everything from scratch if I want use it as a daily.

  • Gunpachi
    2•8 months ago

    If you are comfortable with fedora and want KDE as your Desktop, then you could try out Fedora’s KDE spin among other spins avaialble at https://fedoraproject.org/spins/

    Also If you haven’t already gotten familar with the command line, I recommend you do that as it’s gonna be the same no matter what Desktop you choose to use. Plus it’s gonna improve your Linux experience and your life.

    • Dariusmiles2123OPEnglish
      2•8 months ago

      I’ve heard that when you try another DE on your installation, it might give you some weird behaviors, especially if you wanna go back to Gnome afterward.

      Is it true?

      • Gunpachi
        2•8 months ago

        Usually there won’t be any issue in having 2 DEs. But if you uninstall the first DE after you install the second DE - it’s possible to accidentally remove some common packages. This could result some weird behaviours, but the DE in most cases should still be usable.

  • @iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee
    2•8 months ago

    I wish this was a thing. But I don’t think it is. I’d love to have a USB drive that could be run virtually and vice versa.

  • @CameronDev@programming.dev
    1•8 months ago

    Maybe a roundabout solution, but if you spend your effort into setting it up via ansible, then it would theoretically be easy to redeploy it to your real machine? Doesnt help if you’ve already setup your vm.