## Introductory Spiel I'm dual booting. Again. Yes i know stop roasting me. I kept the windows partition the device starts with, and want to add a UNIX partition of *some sort*. I've used Arch, Debian, freeBSD and openBSD in my days. Honestly my favorite was freeBSD for the following reasons, - Built in ZFS support. (i just think it's neat) - It had drivers for my wifi nic that Arch didn't at the time. - I like their init system with `rc.conf` better than systemd. - I like how `doas` is configured, reminiscent of `pf`. However, the one I've used the MOST is Arch. It taught me a lot about using UNIX and the like systems and is why I'm as comfortable in a CLI as I am. However however, I'm nearing my 30's and I'm not in school anymore and I kind of want my laptop to Just Work (ironic considering the following shenanigans) because I have other projects to get to. I initially set this dual boot up with an Arch install in my usual fashion, a USB key that holds a LUKS decryption key, as well as the volume referenced by pamusb to hold the pads for user auth (aren't I so cool), and launch I3 with startx from my `.zshrc` It felt stale. I've grown as a person and wan't something else. So I wrote my own TODO [GRUB](grub.html) theme! then I set up a ZFS arch install and got ALL the way to trying to get grub to decrypt the root partition only to THEN read that grub was not able to handle a natively encrypted root ZFS partition. I tried 2 different live USB's to see if I had freebsd hardware support and when it didn't work right away and saw some posts indicating it wont I dropped it along with my dreams of a perfect system. https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=276379 So the girl I was seeing at the time kept pushing me on just using Debian with little sly jokes at every hiccup. oy vey. I have this problem where every use-case I envision is too edge-case to be practical. my IDEAL system is an encrypted ZFS on root freeBSD install with a removable boot drive running on a macbook air with that sweet sweet all-day-battery apple silicon, with a big server at home to stream games from. (I only really use laptops, my desk just has a docking station.) but alas, freeBSD doesnt support apple silicon. openBSD does but it doesn't support ZFS. In lieu of freeBSD supporting my hardware, I opt for linux, and go with Debian (because a girl told me to lol), but also because I found THIS. https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v2.2.x/guides/debian/bookworm-uefi.html#zfs-pool-creation Because I REALLY, for admittedly No Good Reason, want to use ZFS. (listen I just think it's neat) However It doesn't use GRUB so I cannot use my theme, and somehow (we will get into this) ZFSbootmenu does NOT support reading a decryption key from a USB drive at boot. However however however, Debian also uses a different initramfs tool than Arch so I cannot use the tools i use to change the tty colors in the frame buffer at boot. Much to my chagrin, but we'll get there. ## Compromises ### Software freeBSD - Doesn't support my hardware - Can't theme my boot screen openBSD - Doesn't support ZFS my pet file system - Can't theme my boot screen Debian - Doesn't *support* ZFS but you're reasonably able to use it - Method to do so means I cannot theme boot - `initramfs-tools` doesn't support modules made for use with `mkinitcpio` so some of my usual tools don't work - not BSD Arch - Too much config (ironic i know) - Even LESS able to support ZFS with rolling release - Inherently a Little Less Stable - not BSD ### Hardware - driver support for NVIDIA in Linux is weird and we will have to take measures to prevent the GPU from overheating - Razer laptops do not support adding keys to TPM - source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Razer_Blade#Secure_Boot ---

The following are Documents outlining the journey to something workable that I'm sufficiently satisfied with the nicheness of.