One thing you could do that I don’t see mentioned here is to install Virtual Box in Windows and create a Linux Mint Virtual Machine. It’s basically installing a computer within a computer. You should be able to find some tutorials online.

This would let you try Linux Mint in a sandbox within Windows so that you could experiment a bit with everything before changing anything.

Just keep in mind that within the VM, things will be less performant, especially graphically, and certain peripherals, etc. might not work. But it would let you test out installing the software you want, the cloud storage solution you want, browsing around, etc.

Speaking of graphics, you’ll want to do some research about how well supported your GPU is. It will almost certainly “work” out of the box, but if you want to get the most performance out of it, like Windows, you’re going to need special drivers. I’ve heard Nvidia can be a bit of a pain, but I think it varies by model.

I wouldn’t be too worried about the touch screen as that will probably work - or at least has on every laptop I’ve tried. I’ve had more issues with things like fingerprint scanners generally speaking. Definitely check out everything you can think of when you install, like Bluetooth, cameras, microphone, peripherals, etc. Oh and when using the laptop definitely manually knock yourself down out of performance mode using the upper-righthand corner in gnome. For me at least, it makes a huge difference in battery life if I’m in performance vs balanced vs power saver. Windows is better at automatically making those adjustments.

I’ve also heard that lately Microsoft is making dual-boot harder - notably that Windows updates will just casually break your dual-boot and revert it to just Windows. I don’t know the details since it’s been years since I’ve done it myself, but something to keep in mind.

Finally I’ll throw out there to make sure you have a recovery plan if the install goes south. Have all your files backed up. Have a copy of Linux and Windows installers ready. It honestly should be fine, but especially if this is your only PC you don’t want to be stuck if you have some kind of issue, accidentally blow away your laptop’s SSD, etc . Not trying to scare you or anything, but better safe than sorry, right?

More of a debugging step, but have you tried running lsinitrd on the initramfs afterwards to verify your script actually got added?

You theoretically could decompress the entire image to look around as well. I don’t know the specifics for alpine, but presumably there would be a file present somewhere that should be calling your custom script.

EDIT: Could it also be failing because the folder you are trying to mount to does not exist? Don’t you need a mkdir somewhere in your script?

It looks like there are instructions here about hosting your own flatpak instance: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

I know for me, at least with gnome, toggling between performance, balanced, and battery saver modes dramatically changes my battery life on Ubuntu, so I have to toggle it manually to not drain my battery life if it’s mostly sitting there. I don’t know if Mint is the same, but just throwing out the “obvious” for anyone else running Linux on a laptop.

Found a blog post that gives a quick overview of how to do git via email in general: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/05/09/how-to-submit-a-patch-by-email-2023-edition

So at least from my understanding you’d make your changes, email the contents of the patch to the maintainer, and then they’d apply it on their side, do code review, email you comments, etc. until it was in an acceptable state.

There’s also the full kernel development wiki that goes into all the specifics: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.16/process/howto.html

(I never got through the whole thing)

I’ll also throw out: aging infrastructure, build systems, coding practices, etc.

I looked into contributing to the kernel - it’s already an uphill battle to understand such a large, complex piece of software written almost entirely in C - but then you also need to subscribe to busy mailing lists and contribute code via email, something I’ve never done at 30 and I’m betting most of the younger generation doesn’t even know is possible. I know it “works” but I’m really doubting it’s the most efficient way to be doing things in 2024 - there’s a reason so many infrastructure tools have been developed over the years.

The barriers to entry for a lot of projects is way too high, and IMO a lot of existing “grey” maintainers, somewhat understandably, have no interest in changing their processes after so much time. But if you make it too hard to contribute, no one will bother.