Try F1 instead of F12. It should be under Setup -> Boot, and then just make your USB the first entry, save, and exit. And just so we’re covering all bases, the usb should be plugged in before you reboot into the bios settings and it may be under a name that doesn’t say “usb” anywhere (for example, the name of my usb in the bios settings contains the manufacturer and size in GB in addition to some other nonsense that i think is a model number).

i dunno why you gotta call me out like that…

I will keep it there for future historians.

great, now i have spit coffee all over the place. thanks for the laugh!

Hmm. So far, i’ve only been considering tiling-is-the-default solutions, but maybe you’re on to something. If I can get my fancy keyboard combos to do tiling stuff just how i like it, there’s no reason why that has to be the default mode of operation…

This is what i use on my work computer! Could it be that the answer was right under my nose this whole time? Still needs some work to get it mouse-friendly enough for him. I guess i could throw gnome-panel and some other niceties on there, though…

As long as i can make my keybinding changes in a text file that i can throw in my dotfiles repo, i’m ok with a bit of tinkering. i like configuring stuff, but only once lol. Openbox sounds like it ticks a lot of my boxes.

If I do go with a DE+alternative WM instead, i’m leaning towards xfce rather than kde, since (as i understand it) xfce is a bit more lightweight. The laptop is getting old, and the hardware wasn’t anything to write home about even when it was new, so any extra performance i can squeeze out of the thing is a plus.

This sounds promising. I think he’d appreciate having the out-of-the-box niceties of a DE, too.

I’ve never had an issue, outside of bios updates (see last paragraph). I’ve even booted into windows after hibernating in linux (but not the other way around, since I don’t let windows hibernate; not saying you can’t, just that I don’t), and everything was fine when i got back. I use a swap partition for hibernating, in case you’re curious.

I do try to make sure I’m watching when it reboots after a windows update (because linux is my default, so i have to select windows from the boot loader) just in case, but i’ve also fucked that up a time or two with no ill effects.

My one piece of advice is: once you get it working, take a picture of your bios settings. You may have to fix some settinga after bios updates, as they can get set back to the default values. I did not do this, and while it led to a very confusing afternoon due to my inexperience, it would have been a non-issue if I’d have taken some pictures and known to look at them.