I recycled an old HP Laptop and replaced it with a Dell Latitude 7310, purchased from Repowered. 16GB RAM (can be upgraded to 32GB), 512GB NVMe drive, Windows 11 Pro. I configured Windows to my needs. Next, install Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)

Since there is only one drive, the first step was to shrink the Windows partition. I have done this many times on other systems. As I have done in recent years, I used a Linux boot repair USB drive, which has gparted included. This would not boot because the system has secure boot installed. I went into the BIOS (F2 during the boot process) and disabled secure boot. Unfortunately, the Windows partition was encryted with BitLocker and could not be shrunk by gparted. Wondering what to do, I rebooted Windows. This failed because, since I had disabled secure boot, the system wanted a BitLocker key, which I did not have. So I went into the BIOS and turned secure boot back on. This let me boot Windows, although it required me to reset my PIN. A little web searching led me to Device Encryption in Windows, which explained how to remove BitLocker encryption. This I was able to do, ignoring the warning about decreasing system security. Just to be sure, after that I rebooted Windows. It again demanded that I reset my PIN. I did, and rebooted Windows again. This time it took my PIN. I could then plug in my boot repair drive and boot to it. I could then start gparted. What had been the BitLocker partition was now an ordinary NTFS partition, and I could proceed in my usual way.

With gparted I shrunk to Windows partition to 175GB, which is plenty for my Laptop needs and added separate swap, root, and home partitions for Ubuntu, and an extra root and home partition in case I want to add another version of Linux. I then rebooted to verify that I had not trashed Windows in the process. This worked. I was able then to install and configure Ubuntu in my usual way.

The above experience reminded me of Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: Demon-haunted computers are back, baby (17 Jan 2024), in which he discussed the problems with “trusted computing.” Such systems treat “the device’s owner as an adversary.” Also they make “installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices.” I just had a taste of this.