I have been running a Dell 7050 with an I5-6500 and 32 GB of RAM for the last 3 years or so. It has served me well, but over the last few months, I began to realize it began to buckle under certain tasks. Mind you, it wasn’t a show stopper, but when an item in the logs said, “your computer is running slow” I figured it was time for an upgrade.
Now funds are very tight for me, so I looked for the bare minimum. I bought a HP Z2 G4 with an i5-8500 processor and 32 GB of RAM. That should hold me for another few years.
The beautiful thing about Linux, is that I took my NVME out of the Dell System, placed it in the HP and voila, it came up without any questions. One or two re-configurations for my displays and everything is working perfectly. Try doing that with Windows
I have had the same success with switching disks from one system to another, either physically moving the disk or using “dd” to copy it. Like you mentioned, the only gotcha I found was the GPU driver.
This works equally well moving physical to virtual or vice versa.
(I moved from a full AMD (CPU & GPU) to an Intel/Nvidia computer with the old HDD’s and it went fine. I didn’t wind up reinstalling until I went to NVME from HDD, but that’s a different story
The Nauveau drivers should handle that just fine. getting rid of the Nvidia drivers will be an issue. Hopefully your Distro had packaged them, kind of like the Non-free-firmware part of Debain repos.
I am more AMD - Nvidia guy, Except the computer I got in 2005 (AMD Athlon 64 + ATI radeon) later computers I ever own AMD CPU + Nvidia card.
Also got Linux and Windows installed on 2 separate sata SSD, I don’t own a NVME drive on my computer, I’m too poor to buy one
My experience cloning various OS from HDDs, I’m mostly using licensed Aomei backupper, which it does don’t know anything about XFS or EXT4, but he dummy copy data from one disk to another. So far so good, it’s getting it’s dirty work done. So no problems after all.
I figured it was time for an upgrade.
