meanwhile in the linux adventure i hit three significant snags right off

it doesnt recognize my 15 year old printer connected via wifi
it doesnt recognize my 2 year old usb scanner
it doesnt play well (but does play) with google drive (Backup and sync)

so i’ll be deep diving into these things in my spare time over the next few days

i did work out the basic disk partitioning, and got timeshift started.
chrome is downloaded and thanks to their sync, all my settings, p/w etc all showed up

baby steps