On Wednesday 11 January 2023, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Hi - I am about to embark on a new adventure and am going to install/upgrade a new motherboard, with new processor, on-board graphics, and memory. (The old one is about 15 years old, dating back to the Pentium 2 core processor days.) I want to keep my OpenSuSE 15.4 x64 system and all the custom application configurations as is. Is there any hiccups or other roadblocks I should prep my system for, before doing this massive hardware change-over? I just want to make this adventure go as smooth as possible and looking for advice from the schools of hard knocks!
Thanks as always, in advance... Marc..
I've never had any substantial issues when moving Linux boot ssd/harddrives to new systems. I did three moves as recently as last year. As others have mentioned you might need to reconfigure for changes such as a different GPU, or audio, but it should boot to where you can do all that later. As for SSD versus NVME. After moving to a Ryzen 5600 based CPU and motherboard last year, I decided to see if 250GB MVME would make much of a difference over the 250 GB SSD that I was using for root (and only root). I think I might have saved a second or two on boot, but there were no other noticeable improvements. I switched root back to SSD: no tiny screws, less handling issues, less heat concerns, no messing with the MB, which makes SSD's quick and easy to swap around, including back into 10 year old machines. SSD is a big win, a couple of years back I've moved /home to a 2TB SSD, totally worth every dollar spent. Rotating rust is now for backups only. As I understand it NVME will be of benefit if you're doing lots of chunky I/O, such as loading up a game, trawling through a database, or a disk to disk copy. I just don't do enough of that kind of thing. I've relegated the NVME to being a utility drive on /mnt/fast. I probably should have spent the NVME money on more RAM. With AMD/Ryzen it's supposedly risky to add more RAM later. The advice seems to be to replace the whole set with another. Intel is supposedly more robust due to older memory controller tech. Mysterious crashes are not something I want to deal with. Michael