Thanks for all the helpful information and comments.

My 'new'/replacement system arrived. It's a refurbed Dell with Windows 10 installed. My original plan was just to install a VM in Windows, until I did the actual set up. It comes with a keystroke logger. Wow. And they really want to improve your user experience by collenting a lot of information and sending you a lot of stuff and giving you rewards.

I know you can "turn it off", but I never believe these claims. That's why I have Google send me my timeline once a month. At least that way I have some idea of what they are tracking.

Gparted worked pretty well. I like to use good old standard partitions, so of course Windows uses 4 primaries. I deleted the recovery partition and resized the main Windows partition and had a decent amount of space. I burnt a Fedora XFCE disk and off to the races.

The install went fine. But I had remembered that during some installs in the past there were more options/questions about bootloaded config. It just installed grub2. I did a custom standard partition and started with it's "default" suggestion, which has no swap space. After making adjustments and adding swap and /var and configing users, the install went without a hitch.

Now I have a system that boots into Fedora 36 just fine, which is all I need. I can begin to figure out how to lock the system down and what to bring in/set up to regain my old setup.

Doing the switch to boot from the disk was interesting. It seems like Dell's BIOS is a little bit out of control. It's redundant and unnecssarily complex. There are two hotkeys F2 and F12 and you have to use them both. According to Dell's own web site, each BIOS is 'customized' to specific hardware. What turning off boot security and turning on legacy boot actually do apparently varies a lot. I had to do that to boot into the live OS and actually do the install.

Apparently Dell believes that difficulting in performing a task is a type of security.

I decided to explore dual boot. I have heard for years that Windows and Linux don't play well. But, an easy test was just to exit out of grub, which then dumps you into Windows bootloader. This worked fine, but the boot option to start windows simply doesn't work.

In looking into adding Windows boot to grub, it should be very easy. Just run os-prober and then update-grub and magically you're done. These are instructions for a Debian based system. I have to do some translation for Fedora and update-grub becomes mkconfig-grub.

But it doesn't work.

It is interesting though that the Linux world is mostly Debian for the 'home' user and more Fedora for the more enterprise folks. No one is going to dual boot their enterprise server, so there is no info. I did find some interesting grub menuitems to try. But I might just abandon the dual boot, because if it breaks when I'm in Windowsland, a distinct possibility, I won't have any tools. Well I'd have the live CD.

But in addition to Windows and Linux not playing well together at boot time, it seems the UEFI and Legacy don't play well together either. I was surpised to find that Fedora 36 is a Legacy boot and Windows is a UEFI.

Just for your entertainment. More reading for me.

And just one bug so far in Fedora or maybe it's Firefox:Firefox won't play any videos. It just tells me the video is unavalable. I don't use this system for that, but it is curious.

-Gary