Earlier this Year I discovered bluefin and switched my laptop from pop_os! to bluefin dx (a framework 13 AMD edition) and I love the concept (I plan on migrating at some point family from pop_os!/other distro to this once I’ve daily drived it for a while and when I’m sure I have no pain point at all).
However I’ve a big desktop with archlinux and lot’s of drive (let’s say 1 NVME, 3 SSD SATA, 2 HDD) and 2 lvm partition (one for my home, one for tinkering/playing with AI).
I’d like to switch but I’m not really used to btrfs and I don’t know what would be the recommendation for installing bluefin on a PC with lot’s of drive. Would it be better to wipe everything and start new with all drives ?
Could I recycle my home from my LVM partition ?
If you have any experience about desktop on bluefin and recommendation I’d love to hear it !
Thanks for this amazing project and the ideas behind it. I’m looking for a good distro for both dev/normal people with not much knowledge of computer and I think with bluefin I’ve found what I need.
I don’t have any experience with lvm, that I can recall.
I have a few drives though. Four 16TB HDD in a zfs raid array, a 2TB SSD for bluefin and home, and two 2TB SSD in a btrfs stripe.
Bluefin will want to install on a whole drive. In the past, I’ve had /home on a separate drive, and after installing bluefin, I changed /etc/fstab to mount the other drive/partition as /home (probably /var/home). Now I don’t bother, and have root, home, and var on the same drive, as bluefin installed it.
The two SSDs in a btrfs stripe I mount to a folder in my home named ‘work’, and that’s where I do my work.
The zfs raid is mounted at /mnt/tank. That’s where I keep large datasets, and I also use Vorta to back up my home and work folders there. I also have dvc repos there, and push data to them.
I have an iMac Pro that is basically a NAS now. Vorta also backs up my Linux box to a JBOD (I think it is) attached to it. Backblaze runs on the iMac, so I have a cloud backup (which would be a nightmare to restore) in case there is a catastrophe.
So, you shouldn’t have to wipe all your drives and start over. You’ll just need one that bluefin can install itself on (which will be formatted). Then you can mount your other drives, pretty much as you would on Arch.
I had a setup about the same as what I have now when I ran EndeavourOS for about a year before making the switch to bluefin.