This surprised me on swapping hard drive.

[wove]

I had at some point a while back took a look at Fedora 38 Kinoite. I installed in on the Thinkpad T580 played a bit, then returned the Endless harddrive to the T580. I have still been trying to find a nice Linux for the 2010 MPB and I put the harddrive from the T580 into the MBP. It booted into Fedora Kinoite, even though Kinoite had been installed on the T580.

There laptops are seperated by 10 years and 9 generaltions of intel hardware, not to mention they have different network and graphics cards. I thought that a Linux install only installed drivers and such for the specific hardware it was being installed on. I had not clue that the install included about everything and a hard drive with Linux installed could be moved from machine to machine.

[chris]

This is generally a feature of Linux.
Yes, it only installs the required drivers for the hardware "that it finds"
As in, change the hardware and the required drivers are automatically installed.
Look in /lib/modules/$(uname -r) for all the kernel modules available.
The only problems can occur if the firmware for the kernel version is unavailable.

[crosscourt]

I test all my distros on hardware with individual drives and use different systems to test. I swap out hard drives all the time from system to system with no issues, regardless of the make or age. This was one of the qualities I loved about Linux versus the restrictions of Windows.

[wove]

Live and learn I guess. That is convenient for testing things out, but I am not sure I would want that for my main secure system. I will need to think this over some more. Makes me glad though for all my reqular working hardware I have my drives encrypted.

[crosscourt]

Its amazing as I swap a lot of OS all the time for tests, previews and compatibility with hardware. I bought up lots of cheap 128gb ssds and Ive got around 25 distros on drives right now.