My laptop is set up as btrfs on a LUKS-encrypted partition. I bought a new M.2 drive, installed it on the extra slot… then wasted most of a day trying to make it work. Here’s a synopsis of why and what I did to resolve the problems. Hope it helps.
Monday morning I was unable to solve the NYT crossword. I stared at my laptop screen in disbelief and apprehension, unable to fill in a single square. On a Monday1. Dementia already? Stroke? Should I start taking Lion’s Mane extract? After finding my breath and calming my fears, I resolved to put my hopes on podman.
Podman is a container virtualization tool created and developed by my software team at Red Hat. It is not what most neurologists would suggest in a consultation; the reason I turned to it first was that my symptoms did not actually match the usual ones of cognitive decline2: my problem wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the clues, or that I could understand them but not think of the answers, it was that I couldn’t see the clues at all—nor, for that matter, the grid or anything related to the crossword program I’ve been using for the last fifteen years. It just crashed immediately upon starting.
