I have a laptop with an Intel i5-1335 CPU and I’m about to receive a mini PC with a Ryzen 8845HS, which is going to be my main computer now. If I just install the SSD M.2 of the laptop on the mini PC, is there any software I need to install that was not installed when first installed Linux on the SSD while being in the laptop? Or something that I need to change in the configuration concerning the new architecture? is it OK to do that? In other words, can Linux deal with the change without any issue or misconfiguration? Just trying to see if I can avoid the work of installing Linux from zero and all the software that I already have on the laptop. I’m using Debian Trixie.
Linux works very differently than Windows. In the majority of cases, assuming the architecture are the same (they are for you), you can just swap the drive and it’ll just work. You only need to tell the BIOS to not from the drive. The only considerations would be around graphics, but even then it should come up well enough so you can install packages if needed.
Unless you manually configured a bunch of things you shouldn’t need to do anything at all. AMD generally has great open source drivers so everything should just work™️
Debian is usually pretty good at auto-detecting hardware. It might be that your Ethernet and/or WiFi adapters will get new IDs and thus you might have to reconfigure your IP address and/or WiFi. But that should be about it.
Assuming there is full hardware support in the new machine, it’ll be fine. You’ll want to install the AMD firmware and microcode packages if they don’t get auto selected during updates, and make sure if you’re using any GPU acceleration to have the proper Mesa packages and extensions installed and enabled for AMD hardware versus Intel as it’s currently probably configured.
Haven’t tried swapping completely different CPU brands, but if you have set up CPU microcode, you might want to uninstall that before swapping over.
For graphics cards, Intel and AMD drivers can exist side by side so you should be able to install the AMD ones before transplanting it over.
Other than that, it should be fine. And worst case you can always swap back!
I did swap a drive from an Intel desktop to an AMD desktop. It worked with no issues. Just make sure the kernel is new enough to support the CPU in the new PC before swapping the drive.
I’ve moved Linux SSDs (not Debian) between disparate machines a number of times and it has always just worked. There’s a good chance Debian will just run too.
