Happy to give the idea away.

This did it. Previously /boot/grub/grub.cfg mentioned Windows on sda3 but now it doesn’t. The partition is still there of course but at least I don’t see the grub menu entry. Many thanks!

Well yes, but many users say it’s better to start with a clean install. This gives me sleepless nights as we are slowly approaching the release to Debian 14 .

I wouldn’t suggest messing with a boot partition unless you are comfortable using a live boot disk to reinstall the bootloader if something goes wrong.

Repartitioning done but I still get the Windows option in the bootloader menu. It’s not the default so not a problem but it’s a little annoying.

I have changed the partitions and all seems to work but I still get the bootloader menu with the Windows option even though there is no Windows partition. Not a huge problem, but it is a little annoying I can’t remove references to Windows without risking breaking my setup.

Very reassuring. The Ship of Theseus approach has been working for me for decades.

It will take some reading but this sounds like a good long-term solution. Perhaps LVM should be the default. And there should be a live USB GUI method that would make the process less scary and safer. Thanks.

ah, OK it’s not just me then. I find the prospect of having to reinstall Debian on my main work machine every two years is scary. I’d rather have the messy partitioning for the rest of my life :)

I have been wondering about this. People recommend backing up /home and then reinstalling very casually, eg many recommend a new install when the new Debian stable is released every two years. My personal files and most of my user setup are stored in /home but wouldn’t many customisations be stored in /? I have been tweaking things for nearly a year to get everything working. I wouldn’t want to spend ages to reinstall applications (flatpaks and all) and re-create my working setup. People being so relaxed about nuking their setup tells me I may be missing something here.

Yes, that looks safe enough. I am not sure what I would do with a 300GB / though. Isn’t that wasted space?

This looks fairly straightforward. I have done (1) already. It’s not great that / will be that big, wasting around 200GB but the setup is definitely better than now and the risk is minimal.

I’d rather have a single large /home partition, and the LVM method sounds less risky if I find out how to do it safely. I am sure I read somewhere that LVM is the clean way to manage partitions.

I see my fstab says the following, so it’s UUIDs although I am not sure about that /swapfile:

# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=9178d5fa-87a7-4e65-ba88-726f41c84186   /                        ext4   errors=remount-ro   0 1 
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=0B9E-D68E                              /boot/efi                vfat   umask=0077          0 1 
# /home was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=0a3aa38a-1673-4064-b573-9a090be7f3cb   /home                    ext4   defaults            0 2 
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation
# UUID=ca915564-2474-4399-ae6c-b4d9b73e69d1 none            swap    sw              0       0
#
# added swapfile
/swapfile                                   none                     swap   sw                  0 0 
/dev/sdb1                                   /media/myuser/backintime   ext4   nofail              0 0 

I am happy to leave the fat32 partitions alone, and deleting the first two NTFS partitions and merging them is easy. What troubles me is how to move the new big partition next to /home so that I can merge them. I hadn’t considered using creating an LVM to merge them logically. It sounds less risky for a newbie if I find how to do it.

We will see if they can achieve firing many engineers in the next round, but from what they openly say there that is their plan. It is unlikely they will ever get rid of all engineers, but using AI as an excuse, redundancies seems what they want. Not about the same level of expertise, but factory workers are widely used to train the LLMs that will replace them. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jun/24/indian-factory-workers-told-film-themselves-for-ai-robots

“We recognised that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals,”

Surely, this means Ford will spend more time getting engineers to train AI and then they will fire them again.

In other news (well, from April): https://post.parliament.uk/facial-recognition-technology-in-policing

I had missed the proxies and it looks great. It would work well with FoxyProxy in my current setup. But I can’t get it to work with my network socks5 proxy. I enter something like http://ip:port (which works well with FoxyProxy) but I get ‘The proxy server is refusing connections’. Does the URL pattern look correct?

EDIT: I get the web page only when Firefox VPN is running presumably because then the connection is routed through Firefox VPN rather than my socks proxy, so the proxy feature is not working here for some reason.

Isn’t that what MAC + Simple Tab Groups do? Isn’t it still the case that if we have, say, 10 tabs in the same container they can read each other’s cookies and possibly other data? If that’s true, it seems one way to stop this is to create a separate container for each site. That would be very impractical unless the browser does it for us.

Unless I misunderstand this, the problem with Multi-Account Containers is that sites sharing the same container can read each other’s cookies probably because MAC is actually designed for multi-account scenarios rather than to isolate each site. I wish there was a way to containerise each site by default without breaking the web.

Konform Browser

Looks good but I would miss new Firefox features and the stricter the restrictions the more friction. I used NoScript for a while in the past and it was a nightmare.

Well yes, but I am trying to figure out if Strict Protection and different containers overlap in what they do. If yes, I don’t see why FF maintains and promotes all of them. Facebook Container seems like a single-case Multi-account Container, and Strict Protection seems to block cross-site cookies anyway.

On fingerprinting, perhaps switching languages, addons etc on/off would confuse trackers. FF could even do that automatically.