Part 1 - The Install
Created Thursday 06 December 2018
The new computer is a Dell XPS 13 (of which there are many variants. The old one is ALSO a Dell XPS 13) But the new one sports a 1TB hard drive (now I can keep everything with me, music et al) and is a 2-in-1, with a bluetooth stylus as well. Major drawback is a little bit of Apple-itis, in which the only ports are USB-C.
This one shipped with Windows 10, and obviously we can't have that. ☺ So the first step was dealing with Secure Boot and UEFI, two supposed security measures that I can't help but think are both mostly pointless for the user; they don't protect against access to the actual drives, for example. My suspicion is that they're mainly to maintain Windows primacy (and lately, big-air-quotes "approved" versions of Linux, since Linux has already won in an odd way.)
Choice 1 - Dual-boot or Linux only? I'm going with Linux only. I think Windows 10 is presently useless-if-not-dangerous enough as it is as an OS, not to mention the jealous havoc it wreaks when it discovers that it's not the only OS on your system. Honestly, I believe there's literally no good reason to have a bare-metal Windows install except for gaming purposes. (And that's changing too) If you absolutely need a Windows program, use Virtualbox or other Virtualization.
Which distro of Linux? I usually like to go for a light-flavor of Ubuntu, all the good packages without a lot of the bloat that regular ubuntu comes with. However, because this machine is pretty beefy and is a 2-in-1, (which current Ubuntu/Gnome is known to work well with) I'm going to use regular Ubuntu. I will certainly be installing different Window Managers/DE's, including but not limited to Awesome WM.
Most people can just go ahead and use the usual installer, but here's Part 1a - A bit on encryption (LUKS) and LVM when installing
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