I spent way too much time trying to set up a dedicated linux machine, only to have it die before my eyes minutes after I powered it up. The moral of the story, Don't store you Hard Disk drives in the garage. I think the extreme temperatures we get up north may have affected them for the worse. On the plus side, I found out you can set up a linux distro within Windows with WSL. No more dual booting to experiment with Linux when I'm on Windows.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
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