I mean, you’re free to continue using your crescent wrench as a hammer if you find it drives nails for you decently well and you are comfortable using it that way. But it was neither designed with that purpose in mind, nor does anyone expect you to use it that way, so no one will be writing how-to guides on it.

Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

They mutually imply one another.

If something was private, but not secure, well, that implies there are ways to breach the privacy, which isn’t very private at all.

If it’s secure, but not private, that implies it’s readable by someone other than the consenting conversational parties, which makes it insecure.

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Hydrus?

Tab hoarding is just poor man’s bookmarks.

Oh wait, you’re on Gelbooru. Nevermind, I get it.

No one said it was shameful?

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

This is almost word for word what I said in another friend group today. Protecting individuals is literally why LLCs exist. It’s what “LLC” stands for.

Nintendo Hyper Beam’d them into oblivion but they got a Substitute up first. The defense strategy was smart. The strategy that put them in the position of needing to use the defense strategy was idiotic, yes, but the defense was smart.

Short of Nintendo doing nothing at all, this is probably the best outcome that could have realistically happened.

Indeed, it is my choice. And as of now, even in light of all of this article’s information, I have chosen Discord. For now.

Deal breaking flaws to others are not necessarily deal breaking flaws to me. If their differences in principles prevent them from reaching me on my preferred platform, tough noogies for them.

You’d certainly think so. But never underestimate a user’s ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn’t designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a “just ask around on the Discord” link serving the role.

Discord probably isn’t used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it’s a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn’t outright disabled, it’s a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.

Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don’t update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.

Fwiw I’ve also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.

I don’t mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.

Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.

Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don’t care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that’s fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.

Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.

It can also better integrate into the dev’s personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I’ve had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I’ve held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I’m terminally online on Discord. So if I’m gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I’ll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.

Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it’s the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I’m hanging out.

Making more money back than they paid.

It amazes me how every time a for-profit company that provided a free service goes mask-off and starts aggressively monetizing it so many people put on a shocked Pikachu face.

This is exactly how this works, people! The free shit is always bait to draw you in and get you invested. The trap was designed from the start to snap shut once there was enough of you in it. They fully intend to not just extract value from you to run the service, but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you. It was always a loan. An investment.

Oh, sure, you can always be sly by taking the free shit and ditching once monetization comes over the horizon. But do so knowing that every time you need to do this is the rule, not the exception. Companies aren’t suddenly slighting you one by one out of the blue, it was always the strategy from the beginning for all of them.

Too many experts who value the deeper teaching potential angle seem to never want to acknowledge the bounce rate it will also have.

No, not everyone asking about how to get into the Linux ecosystem is doing so specifically because the knowledge itself is its own reward. Those who are will tighten their belts, whiten their knuckles, and figure it out just like you hoped they would. Those who aren’t will collapse under the sheer weight of all the bullshit and bail out. Frankly I’d consider the bulk of curious new users to be the latter and I default assume it for everyone who appears unless they indicate otherwise.

Some people think this kind of filtering based on willingness to learn is a good and healthy thing. I call it elitism and gatekeeping.

I use KDE on Debian and did not encounter this problem when I did the reverse action (migrated /home from a second drive back to the system drive).

This may be an insulting question, but are your files in the new home partition inside a /home directory on that partition? Because if they are, that would definitely mess it up. If you mounted that to /home in your fstab file, then the path to your home dir would be /home/home/user instead of /home/user. Your user directory needs to be at the root of the filesystem on that partition.

I expect you did not make this mistake, but a sanity check never hurts…

Oh, and check the files on the new partition with ls -l as well. See who owns them. If you did the copy with the root account or with sudo, the owner of the files might be root. They should be owned by the user you are trying to log in as.

I can’t give you precise directions on how to troubleshoot this, hoping someone else can chime in with some wisdom.

What I can tell you is that being able to log in and then failing to launch a session is definitely evidence that your system either cannot find or cannot access the /home directory. I ran into the same thing not too long ago, but I guarantee you that we don’t have the same problem. Mine was file permission related due to installing a new OS. You have the same OS.

When you installed your OS, did you create a root user account? Not an account that can use sudo, I mean the root user. That user has a special home directory, /root, which is entirely separate from /home. If you can find a guide that tells you how you can boot your OS as the root user, try that.

Put your system back into the broken state with the new partition in the fstab file, reboot, log in as root, and check the filesystem. If you did things correctly, a /home directory should be there, and there should be files in it. If you don’t see it, it means for whatever reason it failed to mount on startup. Try using the mount command manually to force it to mount, and see if it gives an error. If it works with the command, it means your fstab is not correct.

Best of luck! Welcome to the Linux experience… lmao

or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?

Privacy and usability are inversely correlated. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has a relatively weak definition of “privacy” or a relatively exotic definition of “usable”. If you’re at the point of installing an OS like Gentoo just for its privacy benefits alone, I’d say you’re already the latter case, even from the perspective of most fellow Linux users.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily imply very un-private software is always very usable, or that highly privacy-respecting tools with good UX don’t exist. Just that most highly UX-polished software tends to have poor privacy, and most privacy-focused software expects the user to do a lot of hoop-jumping to make up for all the systems and workflows the user can’t utilize due to having some dealbreaking non-privacy-respecting component to them.

Here’s an overview of how Linux reads its filesystems on boot:

1. You press the power button on your PC.
2. Your motherboard receives power and begins a process called Power-On Self-Test, or POST. This is essentially the motherboard “feeling out” on all of its ports to see what’s connected. It senses all of your hard drive(s).
3. The motherboard picks one of the partitions on one of the connected drives and tries to run it as an operating system. For a linux system, you want this to be /boot.
4. /boot finds your actual system partition and tries to spin up the OS using it. This partition becomes the “main” one you’ll see by default when it’s fully up and running.
5. At some point in the boot process, Linux checks the contents of the file at /etc/fstab. “fstab” here is short for “file system table”. It’s basically a list of other partitions plugged into your PC, and a mapping of where it should be mounted in your filesystem. If your system partition was Partition A, for example, and you had another Partition B that you want to be accessed at the path /B, you’d add a line to your fstab file that says something to the effect of, “hey, reach out to the connected partition with ID <long id string>, and if it’s there, create the folder /B, and make the files inside of the partition show up there.” This is called “mounting” the filesystem. You can do it manually at any time with the mount command. The fstab file is just a way to get Linux to auto-mount permanent partitions on startup. You can mount any drive to any path, including /home.

What you need to do is:

1. Format your new drive, and create a new partition there.
2. Mount the new partition with the mount command. Park it anywhere you want. /media/new_home or whatever you like. This will just be a temporary place.
3. Copy everything from your /home directory to the newly mounted one.
4. Move the existing /home folder to literally anyplace else than where it currently is. \home_old would do. It just needs to be out of the way. You almost certainly want to do this only when logged in as the root user, or from another OS running off a USB. You will not be able to log in as any user after you do this until you finish the following steps.
5. Edit your /etc/fstab file to point your new home partition to the path /home. This will “hook up” the new partition.
6. Reboot to make Linux mount the new partition.
7. Verify everything works.
8. Delete the backup home directory.

Answering some of your questions:

Can /home live on a separate drive from the system partition?

Yes. Linux does not care in the slightest where any mounted drives are. A drive is a drive is a drive. If it mounts, it mounts. Just make sure it’s in your fstab file.

How should I organize my partitions?

There is no right answer. It depends entirely on what you need and how you intend to use your PC. But since that answer is unhelpful, I’ll tell you how I’ve done mine. I currently have a single 2TiB SSD split up like this:

[ 200 MB boot | ~500 GB system | 2 GB free | ~1.5 TiB home | 8 GB swap ]

Boot comes first and is tiny. System is probably an order of magnitude bigger than it ought to be, but whatever. 2 GB of deliberately unallocated space is there for the exceedingly rare situation where a dumb bug chews up all the storage on the system partition rendering it un-runnable; it’s emergency expansion space I can tack on to get it running just long enough to resolve the problem. Home gets the lion’s share. And swap goes at the end, where home can cannibalize it if some day I decide I don’t need so much swap space.

You would probably organize your drives in a similar way, except one drive would be entirely dedicated to /home and nothing else, and system taking up the bulk of the other drive. That would be the easy and naive solution. Some users may be inclined to create other partitions for organizational purposes. I personally don’t care for that organizational pattern, so, w/e.

I cannot help you with your display troubles. :(

Distrohopping sounds exhausting. I don’t know why people bother.

How people can just wake up one day and go, “Man, FUCK all my apps and settings, today I want to reinstall and reconfigure 70% of them and then find and learn alternatives to the 30% that aren’t transferrable, and completely disrupt my workflow for several weeks” is utterly beyond me.

It’s like a miniature version of people who get tired of living in a place and just… move. For no reason. All that effort, selling your home, finding a new one, finding a new job, just because you’re… bored?? I am not knocking it, I just can’t relate at all.

I started my Linux life in Ubuntu MATE, and then to Debian when I figured I no longer needed Ubuntu’s handholding and I was tired of dealing with MATE’s abysmal lack of community resources and documentation. Unless and until Debian either becomes antagonistic to me or their support for new software becomes severely crippling, I have no intentions to leave.

It just works. Leave it be. This is my home.

My phone has this problem. It’s RAM.

My phone is literally never not using the full 8 GB it has, and it’s constantly juggling. Even when I have next to nothing open.

What’s eating it all? Fuck if I know. My phone also has a system memory leak that has eaten up 90% of the onboard storage with modem crash dumps I can’t delete without root, and this phone has no custom firmware to do that. Got what I paid for, I guess…