Question Linux on a USB or VM?

mikeymikec · Apr 8, 2025

biostud said:
I'm wondering, has anyone ever tried to make a "GitHub" store or something similar for Linux?

Basically a place where you could simply search for something like this OneDrive app, click install and it would determine your Linux version and run or (prompt you) all the correct commands to get the software installed, or would that be against the security idea of Linux?

The OneDrive app is a particularly unusual exception to the rule IMO.

On Linux Mint I can fire up the 'Software Manager' app, search for stuff and any result I click on will be installed by just clicking 'install'. On Linux Mint 21 there's also the 'synaptic package manager' which tends to be my first stop.

In terms of increasing difficulty, I don't mind a bit of sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb because usually that's all there is to it. Adding a trusted ppa repository then sudo apt install is barely any harder (two commands rather than one). I've got a note of the instructions for installing the Epson print/scan software as that's trickier. Any software that has to be completely manually installed I haven't had much luck with, nor have I done any compiling since I migrated. The instructions that I previously encountered for the OneDrive app were different and I didn't even bother trying them.

I'm a tad surprised that there isn't a OneDrive client easily available for Linux. I would have thought that any cloud storage provider - especially those who offer a "first taste is for free" service - would want to make their wares as easily available as possible. I briefly looked into cloud storage services for Linux here (some support is built-in, for example Google Drive):

Question - Cloud storage sync clients (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox) on Linux

I can't remember what piqued my curiosity to look into it today, though if I am to start offering Linux to customers then it's probably going to come up at some point. I'm running Linux Mint 21.1 Cinammon and had a quick play around (by starting up the 'Online Accounts' app that comes with the...

forums.anandtech.com

Dropbox has a client available through the 'Software Manager' app.

biostud · Apr 8, 2025

mikeymikec said:
The OneDrive app is a particularly unusual exception to the rule IMO.

On Linux Mint I can fire up the 'Software Manager' app, search for stuff and any result I click on will be installed by just clicking 'install'. On Linux Mint 21 there's also the 'synaptic package manager' which tends to be my first stop.

In terms of increasing difficulty, I don't mind a bit of sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb because usually that's all there is to it. Adding a trusted ppa repository then sudo apt install is barely any harder (two commands rather than one). I've got a note of the instructions for installing the Epson print/scan software as that's trickier. Any software that has to be completely manually installed I haven't had much luck with, nor have I done any compiling since I migrated. The instructions that I previously encountered for the OneDrive app were different and I didn't even bother trying them.

I'm a tad surprised that there isn't a OneDrive client easily available for Linux. I would have thought that any cloud storage provider - especially those who offer a "first taste is for free" service - would want to make their wares as easily available as possible. I briefly looked into cloud storage services for Linux here (some support is built-in, for example Google Drive):

Question - Cloud storage sync clients (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox) on Linux

I can't remember what piqued my curiosity to look into it today, though if I am to start offering Linux to customers then it's probably going to come up at some point. I'm running Linux Mint 21.1 Cinammon and had a quick play around (by starting up the 'Online Accounts' app that comes with the...

forums.anandtech.com

Dropbox has a client available through the 'Software Manager' app.

Dropbox is just really expensive compared to M365 family.

M365 6x1TB is 799DKK ~107€/year while Dropbox family 2TB is 203,88€/year

biostud · Apr 8, 2025

Also I found this guide for installing Linux Mint on my SATA SSD

Dual-boot Linux Mint 22 and Windows 11, with Mint on external drive

Step-by-step guide on how to dual-boot Linux Mint 22 and Windows 11, with Mint on an external drive. GRUB is installed on the drive Mint is installed on

linuxbsdos.com

is there anything else I should be aware of?

The last 1.5TB of my SATA SSD contains my photos and onedrive folders, which are in the cloud and just backed up on an external harddrive, but obviously I would prefer not to bork that partition in the process.

manly · Apr 8, 2025

biostud said:
I'm wondering, has anyone ever tried to make a "GitHub" store or something similar for Linux?

Basically a place where you could simply search for something like this OneDrive app, click install and it would determine your Linux version and run or (prompt you) all the correct commands to get the software installed, or would that be against the security idea of Linux?

Not really applicable for Linux. With Linux, you traditionally use "packages" and the new thing are Flatpaks/snaps.

The onedrive package is probably already in the Mint repository, so you can install it without the extra steps.
I'm on Ubuntu, and the package is a little older than the snap version. Given this choice, I would stick with the older package because snaps are arguably one of Ubuntu's weaker points. (The snap in the Ubuntu store is also marked as unofficial.)

macOS has Homebrew (or Mac Ports), which is a software package manager. But Linux has had package management already for decades, so it doesn't usually require this kind of source code-based deployment tool.

biostud · Apr 8, 2025

manly said:
Not really applicable for Linux. With Linux, you traditionally use "packages" and the new thing are Flatpaks/snaps.

The onedrive package is probably already in the Mint repository, so you can install it without the extra steps.
I'm on Ubuntu, and the package is a little older than the snap version. Given this choice, I would stick with the older package because snaps are arguably one of Ubuntu's weaker points. (The snap in the Ubuntu store is also marked as unofficial.)

macOS has Homebrew (or Mac Ports), which is a software package manager. But Linux has had package management already for decades, so it doesn't usually require this kind of source code-based deployment tool.

I will investigate packages and flat paks/snaps as the words have no meaning to me.

But the onedrive software has the following disclaimer:

Although packages for the 'onedrive' client are available through distribution repositories, it is strongly advised against installing them. These distribution-provided packages are outdated, unsupported, and contain bugs and issues that have already been resolved in newer versions. They should not be used.

mikeymikec · Apr 8, 2025

biostud said:
Also I found this guide for installing Linux Mint on my SATA SSD

Dual-boot Linux Mint 22 and Windows 11, with Mint on external drive

Step-by-step guide on how to dual-boot Linux Mint 22 and Windows 11, with Mint on an external drive. GRUB is installed on the drive Mint is installed on

linuxbsdos.com

is there anything else I should be aware of?

The last 1.5TB of my SATA SSD contains my photos and onedrive folders, which are in the cloud and just backed up on an external harddrive, but obviously I would prefer not to bork that partition in the process.

Do you really have to install an OS on a USB drive? The latency is pants compared to SATA/NVMe.

My method of dual-boot is with two SSDs, first install Windows (with only one SSD connected), then install Linux on the second one. You can choose which drive to install the Grub boot manager on. When I migrated my setup from Haswell to AMD7000 I changed boot management to be hosted on the Linux SSD, so I could conceivably remove it and Windows would still be able to boot.

I have Secure Boot disabled, I can't remember if I needed to do that. Also the first time I did the dual-boot setup I had to disable 'fast boot' otherwise the Linux install couldn't write the boot management stuff properly. I enabled fast boot again after install IIRC.

One other bit of fun and games you might have to engage in is to faff around with how each OS does time sync, otherwise you might end up where one OS routinely puts the clock forward/back an hour. See how it goes and let me know if you need help with it, my linux journal probably has a note in about it.

biostud · Apr 8, 2025

mikeymikec said:
Do you really have to install an OS on a USB drive? The latency is pants compared to SATA/NVMe.

My method of dual-boot is with two SSDs, first install Windows (with only one SSD connected), then install Linux on the second one. You can choose which drive to install the Grub boot manager on. When I migrated my setup from Haswell to AMD7000 I changed boot management to be hosted on the Linux SSD, so I could conceivably remove it and Windows would still be able to boot.

I have Secure Boot disabled, I can't remember if I needed to do that. Also the first time I did the dual-boot setup I had to disable 'fast boot' otherwise the Linux install couldn't write the boot management stuff properly. I enabled fast boot again after install IIRC.

One other bit of fun and games you might have to engage in is to faff around with how each OS does time sync, otherwise you might end up where one OS routinely puts the clock forward/back an hour. See how it goes and let me know if you need help with it, my linux journal probably has a note in about it.

I'm going to install it on my sata ssd. Which will be 1.5TB data partition, a Grub partition and then 500GB Linux Mint.

biostud · Apr 8, 2025

Hmm maybe I should wait until next week when we have Easter holidays so I have time when it goes wrong and my children wants to play on the computer....

biostud · Apr 10, 2025

I managed to get OneDrive running with a GUI on my VM.

Now I just need to figure out how to make a VM into a "physical" machine as everything i setup as I would like, and I don't have to start over, although I then can re-learn everything

manly · Apr 11, 2025

biostud said:
I will investigate packages and flat paks/snaps as the words have no meaning to me.

But the onedrive software has the following disclaimer:

Although packages for the 'onedrive' client are available through distribution repositories, it is strongly advised against installing them. These distribution-provided packages are outdated, unsupported, and contain bugs and issues that have already been resolved in newer versions. They should not be used.

There's a lot of diversity in Linux distros but for a long time, there are two main camps: Red Hat and Debian (Ubuntu is a less stable derivative of Debian). And for the most part, you could install software, provided by the distribution, using the command line. So for Debian and Ubuntu distros, it would be just a couple commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install onedrive

I understand in this particular case, the package maintainer recommends against the distro package, but usually that's not the case.
If Linux Mint is the LTS release from January, that's pretty recent so the distro's onedrive package might be okay.

Snaps and Flatpaks are a newer form of software packaging designed to solve a particular type of problem. Without getting into the weeds, it allows you to update something like Firefox more frequently. This is more inline with how consumers update desktop apps on Windows.

Out of curiosity, how did you install OneDriveGUI? (I assume that's separate.)

biostud · Apr 11, 2025

manly said:
There's a lot of diversity in Linux distros but for a long time, there are two main camps: Red Hat and Debian (Ubuntu is a less stable derivative of Debian). And for the most part, you could install software, provided by the distribution, using the command line. So for Debian and Ubuntu distros, it would be just a couple commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install onedrive

I understand in this particular case, the package maintainer recommends against the distro package, but usually that's not the case.
If Linux Mint is the LTS release from January, that's pretty recent so the distro's onedrive package might be okay.

Snaps and Flatpaks are a newer form of software packaging designed to solve a particular type of problem. Without getting into the weeds, it allows you to update something like Firefox more frequently. This is more inline with how consumers update desktop apps on Windows.

Out of curiosity, how did you install OneDriveGUI? (I assume that's separate.)

Yup, I used the link to this:

GitHub - bpozdena/OneDriveGUI: A simple GUI for OneDrive Linux client with multi-account support.

A simple GUI for OneDrive Linux client with multi-account support. - bpozdena/OneDriveGUI

github.com

And just followed the instructions, and yet a new way to install software on Linux, using an "AppImage"

Zepp · May 22, 2025

biostud said:
Yup, I used the link to this:

GitHub - bpozdena/OneDriveGUI: A simple GUI for OneDrive Linux client with multi-account support.

A simple GUI for OneDrive Linux client with multi-account support. - bpozdena/OneDriveGUI

github.com

And just followed the instructions, and yet a new way to install software on Linux, using an "AppImage"

yeah, Snaps, Flatpaks and Appimages are like somewhat the distro agnostic version of .deb files

here is a good breakdown of Flatpaks vs Appimages from reddit:
"flatpaks and appimages are not made to serve the same niche. Appimages are essentially self-contained programs that work as-is and can be run on almost any distro with little dependencies. These are good for tools like gparted which are already feature complete (does not need frequent updates) and is not dependent on any internet functionality.

Flatpaks are more suited to regular use desktop apps which are still in active development and are being updated with new features and patches frequently, think web browsers / steam.

People prefer flatpaks on desktop because it is literally geared towards desktops. Appimages fill the role of portable self-contained programs and they fill the role well, but ultimately these frameworks are not meant for the same exact thing."

Snaps are Canonical/Ubuntu proprietary format and connect to their servers, I dont have much experience with them but as far as I know they otherwise work much like flatpaks.

biostud · May 23, 2025

With Microsoft starting to close mail pr. Trumps orders, I'm really starting to consider finding a new drive/mail service.

Proton really seems to be the best in regards to security. As start I would get a duo subscription, and later a family when my children would need one, but it I currently pay ~100€/year for a office365 family pack 6x1TB without co-pilot, while proton would cost me ~180€/year for 1TB shared. and family with 3TB would be ~290€.

Am I too paranoid, or is it better to start the move before it is too late?

Create a free email account or choose a paid plan | Proton

Proton Mail provides encrypted, secure email for over 100 million people and businesses. Free and paid plans available.

proton.me

manly · May 23, 2025

Flatpaks/Snaps are nothing like .deb or .rpm packages, and I wouldn't draw such a comparison.

biostud said:
With Microsoft starting to close mail pr. Trumps orders, I'm really starting to consider finding a new drive/mail service.

Proton really seems to be the best in regards to security. As start I would get a duo subscription, and later a family when my children would need one, but it I currently pay ~100€/year for a office365 family pack 6x1TB without co-pilot, while proton would cost me ~180€/year for 1TB shared. and family with 3TB would be ~290€.

Am I too paranoid, or is it better to start the move before it is too late?

Create a free email account or choose a paid plan | Proton

Proton Mail provides encrypted, secure email for over 100 million people and businesses. Free and paid plans available.

proton.me

I don't feel you need to rush, but if you're sure you want to migrate off Microsoft, any time (including soon) is good.

A few years ago, Google notified a small sliver of grandfathered G Suite users that they were ending the free tier. These early adopter accounts came with generous quotas, and were popular for personal use. So I went ahead and migrated my mail hosting to a suitable alternative (Zoho Mail). Some weeks later, Google reversed the decision and left these grandfathered accounts as "Legacy G Suite." Nothing against Zoho Mail, but I migrated it back.

lxskllr · May 23, 2025

biostud said:
Am I too paranoid, or is it better to start the move before it is too late?

That's up to you and your wallet. As an American, I don't trust American services, and that started before Trump. It's also endless bullshit with the big American companies. They degrade service, and while many times it can be worked around, I consider it a hostile act, and I don't have the patience to play games with my software. I can tolerate technical deficiencies much more readily than artificial restrictions.

manly · Jun 12, 2025

Go, Denmark!

Denmark Is Dumping Microsoft Office and Windows For LibreOffice and Linux - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because...

linux.slashdot.org

biostud · Sunday at 3:09 AM

Just ordered a WD SN7100 2TB for dual boot Linux.

So just to be clear, I should leave all my current disks in, create a Mint install USB, and install Grub bootloader and Mint on my new drive, set it to primary boot drive in the BIOS and then everything should be fine and dandy?

Or would you unplug with windows drive and then install linux mint, so that the boot option is done in the BIOS to completely remove chances of either OS corrupting the other?

mikeymikec · Sunday at 4:23 AM

biostud said:
Just ordered a WD SN7100 2TB for dual boot Linux.

So just to be clear, I should leave all my current disks in, create a Mint install USB, and install Grub bootloader and Mint on my new drive, set it to primary boot drive in the BIOS and then everything should be fine and dandy?

Or would you unplug with windows drive and then install linux mint, so that the boot option is done in the BIOS to completely remove chances of either OS corrupting the other?

IMO using the BIOS for boot management would be as irritating as hell because I presume it will default as quickly as possible to whichever OS was booted last.

With GRUB (Linux) as the boot manager, IIRC the OS choice screen has a default timeout setting of 30 seconds. I've set mine to 10 seconds.

I've had dual-drive dual-boot setups with Windows 10/11 + Linux Mint 21.x (GRUB boot management) and never had one OS mess with the other unexpectedly. Win11 has done one feature update in that time on my setup without anything weird happening, and I assume Win10 must have done at least 3 since I ran it from 2018 to 2023.

If you want dual-boot boot management to work properly then the two OS drives are going to have to be connected (unless you're happy to do boot management manually... it's been about 25 years since I last did that!).

One small improvement I made from my Haswell dual-boot setup to my AMD7000 dual-boot setup was to have Linux install boot management stuff onto its own drive. I'm fairly sure I now have a setup whereby I could remove either drive and the machine will boot to the remaining OS, whereas before I did a one-drive-at-a-time migration from one machine to the other and after I wiped the Windows SSD to install 11 on, I lost the Linux boot management that was stored on it. Linux Mint however has an easy repair option which had me up and running with little fuss.

I have a third drive purely for personal data that I can't remember if I left it connected during setup. I probably disconnected it just in case, then sorted out the mounting of that drive in Linux after the OS installation.

In case I haven't mentioned it previously, I would recommend disabling fast boot in the BIOS when you install Linux; when I had it enabled, Linux setup refused to write the boot information to the disk. Re-enable it after setup. I also have secure boot disabled (permanently), which was just as well because Microsoft apparently introduced a bug into Win11 and left it like that for several months whereby a secure boot system with a certain Win11 update would refuse to boot Linux.

biostud · Sunday at 5:57 AM

mikeymikec said:
IMO using the BIOS for boot management would be as irritating as hell because I presume it will default as quickly as possible to whichever OS was booted last.

With GRUB (Linux) as the boot manager, IIRC the OS choice screen has a default timeout setting of 30 seconds. I've set mine to 10 seconds.

I've had dual-drive dual-boot setups with Windows 10/11 + Linux Mint 21.x (GRUB boot management) and never had one OS mess with the other unexpectedly. Win11 has done one feature update in that time on my setup without anything weird happening, and I assume Win10 must have done at least 3 since I ran it from 2018 to 2023.

If you want dual-boot boot management to work properly then the two OS drives are going to have to be connected (unless you're happy to do boot management manually... it's been about 25 years since I last did that!).

One small improvement I made from my Haswell dual-boot setup to my AMD7000 dual-boot setup was to have Linux install boot management stuff onto its own drive. I'm fairly sure I now have a setup whereby I could remove either drive and the machine will boot to the remaining OS, whereas before I did a one-drive-at-a-time migration from one machine to the other and after I wiped the Windows SSD to install 11 on, I lost the Linux boot management that was stored on it. Linux Mint however has an easy repair option which had me up and running with little fuss.

I have a third drive purely for personal data that I can't remember if I left it connected during setup. I probably disconnected it just in case, then sorted out the mounting of that drive in Linux after the OS installation.

In case I haven't mentioned it previously, I would recommend disabling fast boot in the BIOS when you install Linux; when I had it enabled, Linux setup refused to write the boot information to the disk. Re-enable it after setup. I also have secure boot disabled (permanently), which was just as well because Microsoft apparently introduced a bug into Win11 and left it like that for several months whereby a secure boot system with a certain Win11 update would refuse to boot Linux.

Thx, I have a windows boot drive and a data drive and will now add a third drive for Linux boot/data. So you recommend just letting my windows drive stay in and then install Grub and mint on the new drive, maybe disconnect my data drive, just to be safe?

mikeymikec · Sunday at 7:00 AM

biostud said:
Thx, I have a windows boot drive and a data drive and will now add a third drive for Linux boot/data. So you recommend just letting my windows drive stay in and then install Grub and mint on the new drive, maybe disconnect my data drive, just to be safe?

Yup. Back up anything necessary on the Windows drive just in case IIRC Linux Mint setup asked me where I wanted to install it, I think the only way you can go wrong would be to use some kind of full auto option. Presumably you've already installed it in a VM so you know roughly what to expect.

Re the data drive - as I've done two dual-boot setups with Linux Mint (plus a few other Linux distros before I settled on Mint), I can't remember what the results were on the occasions that I left the data drive connected (no disasters, I would remember that!), but my vague memory is that if the data drive is connected then Linux mount it when the user clicks on the drive in the desktop environment, which isn't so great if you have software that is linked to stuff on that drive (e.g. XnViewMP on my setup is configured to open my camera folder when I start it, and that folder is located on the data drive). I altered /etc/fstab post-setup so that the data drive would always be mounted.

One other thing - disable fast startup in Windows, otherwise your ability to mount NTFS drives connected to that Windows install will be impaired.

lxskllr · Sunday at 1:37 PM

My 2¢ is I don't like allowing windows to even know another o/s exists. For a dual boot, I prefer removing drives to do the install, and selecting which o/s I want in bios. Two completely standalone systems. If one drive goes up for whatever reason, you still have a fully functional computer. Mike's observations are on point though. It is more of a hassle, and you will be less likely to change o/ss.

My preference is vm--dual boot/independent drives--dual boot/aware drives. I'm more comfortable having multiple *nixs know of each other.

edit:
My data is pretty old though. I wouldn't take what I say as advice, rather just what *I'd* do. I haven't dealt with any of this in years. I've solely run debian for >15 years.

biostud · Sunday at 3:18 PM

lxskllr said:
My 2¢ is I don't like allowing windows to even know another o/s exists. For a dual boot, I prefer removing drives to do the install, and selecting which o/s I want in bios. Two completely standalone systems. If one drive goes up for whatever reason, you still have a fully functional computer. Mike's observations are on point though. It is more of a hassle, and you will be less likely to change o/ss.

My preference is vm--dual boot/independent drives--dual boot/aware drives. I'm more comfortable having multiple *nixs know of each other.

edit:
My data is pretty old though. I wouldn't take what I say as advice, rather just what *I'd* do. I haven't dealt with any of this in years. I've solely run debian for >15 years.

Well, if the Windows drive gets corrupted, the linux drive should probably work and vice versa?

I'm just for the first time ever using win11 to do a full backup/image of my boot drive to an external hard drive.

Windows shouldn't really be aware of the linux drive (except that it knows it is there and it contains a partition) as it can't read the content of it?

biostud · Sunday at 3:32 PM

mikeymikec said:
One other thing - disable fast startup in Windows, otherwise your ability to mount NTFS drives connected to that Windows install will be impaired.

My system does not support it, or is already disabled in the bios.

manly · Sunday at 3:44 PM

biostud said:
Well, if the Windows drive gets corrupted, the linux drive should probably work and vice versa?

I'm just for the first time ever using win11 to do a full backup/image of my boot drive to an external hard drive.

Windows shouldn't really be aware of the linux drive (except that it knows it is there and it contains a partition) as it can't read the content of it?

I'd leave all the drives in there, and then install Linux. Windows definitely won't do anything about foreign filesystems (ext4). Linux won't harm the existing data unless you make a big mistake. Now if you didn't have any backups, then the risk is somewhat different.

As for installing Grub2, that's a bit complicated. Let's establish some (possible) Linux device names to set the stage first.
NVMe1 (Win11) - /dev/nvme0n1
NVMe2 (new SN7100) - /dev/nvme0n2
SATA1 (data) - /dev/sda

First, I would leave the existing disks in place so that the device names don't change. Modern Linux typically doesn't care about device names (it can use UUIDs for filesystems), but it could still be confusing detaching and reattaching disks.

After Linux installation is where you'll have to make a decision. Right now, the Win11 bootloader is installed on NVMe1 and there is an EFI system partition (aka ESP). OS-specific boot code can be installed into the ESP.

You're proposing to install Grub2 onto NVMe2 (and then choosing the disk to boot via BIOS). This should work, but I suspect Grub2 will see the existing ESP partition and install code there. In bootloader parlance, there is stage 1 code (a tiny part that goes at the top of the disk) that points to stage 2 (larger code with menus/graphics/etc). This leaves you with two stage 1 bootloaders, and then most of Grub2 is installed into the existing ESP. This feels a little confusing to me.

For dual-boot, this isn't quite the "normal way." Normally you just install Grub2 to the first disk (NVMe1), and that's the only bootable device you need selected in UEFI. Grub2 will detect the Windows OS and generate a menu entry for it.

So you'll have two disk selection decision points. The first is where to partition, then install Linux (SN7100). This is the critical one you don't want to fuck up.
The second one is where to install Grub2 near the end; even if you "made a mistake" here, it wouldn't harm any real data and can be fixed.

Finally, supposedly Secure Boot option should work but in the distant past, it's something you would turn off to dual boot Linux.

biostud · Sunday at 4:07 PM

manly said:
I'd leave all the drives in there, and then install Linux. Windows definitely won't do anything about foreign filesystems (ext4). Linux won't harm the existing data unless you make a big mistake. Now if you didn't have any backups, then the risk is somewhat different.

As for installing Grub2, that's a bit complicated. Let's establish some (possible) Linux device names to set the stage first.
NVMe1 (Win11) - /dev/nvme0n1
NVMe2 (new SN7100) - /dev/nvme0n2
SATA1 (data) - /dev/sda

First, I would leave the existing disks in place so that the device names don't change. Modern Linux typically doesn't care about device names (it can use UUIDs for filesystems), but it could still be confusing detaching and reattaching disks.

After Linux installation is where you'll have to make a decision. Right now, the Win11 bootloader is installed on NVMe1 and there is an EFI system partition (aka ESP). OS-specific boot code can be installed into the ESP.

You're proposing to install Grub2 onto NVMe2 (and then choosing the disk to boot via BIOS). This should work, but I suspect Grub2 will see the existing ESP partition and install code there. In bootloader parlance, there is stage 1 code (a tiny part that goes at the top of the disk) that points to stage 2 (larger code with menus/graphics/etc). This leaves you with two stage 1 bootloaders, and then most of Grub2 is installed into the existing ESP. This feels a little confusing to me.

For dual-boot, this isn't quite the "normal way." Normally you just install Grub2 to the first disk (NVMe1), and that's the only bootable device you need selected in UEFI. Grub2 will detect the Windows OS and generate a menu entry for it.

So you'll have two disk selection decision points. The first is where to partition, then install Linux (SN7100). This is the critical one you don't want to fuck up.
The second one is where to install Grub2 near the end; even if you "made a mistake" here, it wouldn't harm any real data and can be fixed.

Finally, supposedly Secure Boot option should work but in the distant past, it's something you would turn off to dual boot Linux.

I thought GRUB was installed along with mint, but it is something I need to install afterwards?

So after I've installed mint on my new disk and let all drives stay in, will it then still boot to Windows, as it is the primary bootloader? or is it depending on which drive I choose in the BIOS?

Or will Windows boot manager identify the mint installation, so I really don't need GRUB?

Question Linux on a USB or VM?

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