raven [he/him]

The typical distro’s installer will just take care of setting up GRUB for you, don’t worry about that. I’m doing something similar with my home partition, except I made a home partition with all the expected user folders ~/Videos ~/Documents ~/Music ~/Games etc and then used overlayFS which keeps ~/.config/ and the like separate for each OS partition while letting me share everything else.

Can I partition /home directory in a different drive and still function?

Yes, easily done.
Open KDE partition manager
Create your new partition in whatever filesystem you like. NTFS can be problematic.
Now copy the contents of /home to the new partition.
Once it’s transferred you can delete the contents of /home, or it will interfere with mounting from the new partition.
Now open KDE partition manager again to set the mountpoint of that partition to /home and check “automatically mount on boot”

You can easily repeat this process to move everything to your new new drive later.

In future if you install linux again, you can do this in the installer by simply telling it to mount X partition as Y mountpoint, even saving all your user files across installs!

Apparently I’m wrong and Pop_Os uses systemD-boot not GRUB, which is surprising to me because unless things have changed I’ve always thought of systemD-boot as being underpowered for a lot of use cases.

If I’m reading the wiki correctly here, I think it’s saying systemd-boot cannot launch windows because it’s on another drive? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Boot_from_another_disk

But on the other hand it’s interesting that it’s able to “see” the windows partition so I might be completely wrong.

Well it’s there at least. Hmm. I don’t know a whole lot about windows but you can certainly get back to those boot options you saw before by pressing shift while booting, which will open the GRUB options. I’d give the windows boot manager another shot from there.

If that ends up working you can change the grub settings to wait for input instead of automatically booting pop. If that doesn’t work then something is probably wrong with windows and I would just try reinstalling since it sounds like you don’t have anything on there yet.

From Pop_OS, if you launch the “disks” program, can you see the other drive there, and the NTFS windows partition on it?

Depending on how old it might be another method. Some have a switch somewhere, or a specific screw. Check out mrchromebox’s page.

And yeah you just boot it with the battery disconnected once and it disables the write protect!

And if you open it up and unplug the battery, then boot off the charger that disables the write protect and you can install actual linux, though a lot of chromebooks have unique hardware that might not be supported, particularly audio IME.

I used to have a dell chromebook 11, and with bitmap fonts it was actually a pretty slick little computer for <$100.

Whatever it is I hope we don’t end up “selling out” for a higher market share. KDE is proof that you can have stability while also having infinite configuration options. Gnome seems to be openly hostile to any other way of doing things that isn’t the gnome way.

I don’t mind gnome existing but it isn’t for me and I hope I don’t get forced into using something that I can’t modify to meet my workflow wishes. I’m seeing a lot more programs being written without prioritizing being desktop agnostic. I think we can forge our own path making a desktop that is both as stable as Mac OS and as approachably configurable as Linux should be.

I’m just upset that they took bitmap font support away from me

Low res displays unusable now.

That would be really cool!

Which functionalities are you missing exactly? I’ve found xfce to be very stable and customizable.

Sway is really impressively stable if you’re willing to learn it and set it up. It’s a tiling WM.

I’ve been running the same arch install with roughly the same sway config for 3 years. My computer has never been so boring!

I had a tiny Dell Chromebook 11 through college running arch. It had a 10/10 keyboard and a decent IPS display, paired with an efficient bitmap font it was perfect for my needs. I should grab one off eBay, it looks like they’re only $40 or so now.

I usually recommend new users try out a few distros from distrowatch on a USB stick with Ventoy making sure to pick a few different desktop environments to try (XFCE, KDE Plasma, Gnome, Budgie, Cinnamon…) There are hundreds and I would argue they have as much of an impact on how your computer works and feels as your distro.

What distro you pick matters less from a user standpoint than you might think. You’re going to get a lot of recommendations for Ubuntu and its derivatives Pop_OS! and Mint. They’re great for beginners IMO except for one small sticking point, which is that they’ve been shipping most software in snap packages and flatpaks which have their own quirks to learn. It’s kind of like a little container or sandbox. You hear a lot of new users saying that they’re having issues with a program not being able to see a file on their computer and it’s usually because the program is a snap or a flatpak.

I usually start off with some Dune lore as a litmus test to see if we can be friends.

• On sway I have this setup that lets me run two instances of any lan-only game in a couch co-op side by side configuration, each window getting its own mouse and keyboard or gamepad.
• Setting up a keybind to do an arbitrary thing is so easy on sway that I’ll set one up just for one task I’m working on then delete it later.
• Put a task bar on the left, the right, the top, half of the screen, the middle of the screen? Whatever, go wild.
• BTRFS with Timeshift leveraging BTRFS’s COW system to give me essentially free backups that I can boot into? Saved my tailfeathers a few times.

Recently there’s been a push on Linux for containerized “apps” that come bundled with their dependencies windows style. Ubuntu has been the one really pushing this with their implementation called “snaps” which has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad idea.

I’ve been on sway since 2019 and I’ve had fewer issues than I did on i3. The performance was an immediate improvement. Feels silky smooth like x never did. Stable as a rock.

Why don’t you just install it alongside X?

Do any of these have:

• As nice a keyboard, that I don’t have to worry about spilling a cup of coffee on.
• Track point or similar.
• Ability to survive a fall down a flight of stairs.
• 4:3 or 16:10 aspect ratio.
• Ports.
  While being built with repairability in mind?

I day dream about stuffing the guts of a modern laptop inside with a USB hub and an enormous battery, but that’s a huge undertaking.