I succeeded in doing this once long ago. Then while in the Linux vm I wiped the VM’s partition table, which wiped the physical disk partition table, including windows. Do not recommend.

I was also going to suggest Haiku. It’s the spiritual successor to BeOs. I was always disappointed that didn’t become more popular.

Get a BeagleBoard! https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead

Edit: or a Star64! https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/

Yes a back up is possible. Don’t back up partitions, back up the whole device. All 150+g at once.

Whenever you try to mount the device or the filesystems, make sure to mount it read-only so that no changes are written to the device.

Also, shrinking 84g of data into 32g is definitely not possible. Just changing the fdisk partition table doesn’t shrink or relocate the data. You need a filesystem-aware resizing tool to shrink the filesystem before shrinking the partition.

Hopefully you can just change the partition table back to the original values and get a clean fsck.

I use Emacs’ Org Mode. It may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but it is highly versatile.

Where’s that X cursor?

Me too. I could never get into nushell or fish because they’re not posix and I don’t need to learn two ways to do something.

You could, but maybe a good shell makes it easier than the external tool. Or maybe you use the shell to effectively combine the inputs and outputs of the other tools.

He did say he was doing it to learn. Maybe when he’s done he will be able to appreciate what goes into making a viable browser.