Ah, self-taught. The slowest, most difficult way.

1. Buy books
2. Read

A “formal education” mostly involves reading a book. These books can be identified, purchaed, and read without enrolling in any course.

I have a whole shelf full of text books for IT degrees and certifications. Despite never enrolling in any classes, amazingly, the books still allowed me to read them.

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Try a Shark. To me, they’re a correctly-priced Dyson. All the same features, same aftermarket options, but about 1/3 the price

A Shark is all of those things for $199

Called it

Oh yeah well I have a skidoo in my peeble joiner using a flimflam from doop

There are distros designed for your use case. Research “portable” distros to get what you’re after without having to crowbar it.

I usually open a document and type notes to myself. If I followed documentation, I’ll link it and download an offline copy in case it 404s one day. I also export configurations to csv or json and link those.

Something else would probably be better but it works for me and for what I do.

Thank you for the implementation advice, that was my next question.

I have an old drive I installed Win 10 on a few years ago. It was a fresh build, so it would have been the only drive in the machine when I installed it. The software I need is already installed there and in a working state.

I also have a new machine with a new drive. I installed Mint on the new drive while it was the only drive in the new machine.

My plan is to move the Win 10 drive from the old machine to the new one. In the BIOS, I would set the Linux drive as the default boot option. When I need Windows, I would boot into BIOS and select the Windows drive as a one-time boot option.

Am I on the right track?

So, even more extra steps for even less functionality, got it.