Getting static shocked by the TV screen.

A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.

The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you're in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren't in a kid's head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent's. The safety risks are high. Always were, that's not new. But the legal risks are new.

And yeah, it's not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn't happen back in, say, my dad's childhood. But I'd wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they're old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren't.

I replied to that thread.

OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it's just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted "open source".

Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn't want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would "drive [them] out of business". Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.

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 , 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. :(

I believe in the adage of, "If it sits between you and the ground, don't skimp".

Shoes, socks, desk chairs, lounge chairs, sofas, car( seat)s, mattresses...

You spend too much time in or on all of these things to be uncomfortable.

I also see posted here the Adam Savage advice of buying cheap tools first, and then upgrade after you better understand your needs. I also think that's great advice you can apply to most things. Just not the above things.

I still listen to my music using a 160 GB iPod Classic. Apple struck gold with that clickwheel. Carrying around a dedicated device for music just for that elegant one-thumb control I don't even have to look at to use is still totally worth it to me.

Theoretically, when it's up and running. How do you intend to get to that state, though? One has to install it first. And I think that alone is a massive filter.

inb4 someone says:

I did it, and I found it extremely straightforward.

I'm sure you did, Mr. "I hate how much Reddit is pandering to the braindead to the point that I joined an experimental social media platform", I'm sure you did. Clearly, you are a qualitative sample of people who use Windows computers.

Sarcasm aside, look at how railroaded and coddling the Windows 10 installer is. I am certain a large plurality of Windows users' initiative would completely evaporate having to navigate that. And now we want to throw a Linux installation at them?

Factor on top how the vast majority of computer users in all forms that computers take simply take for granted that the OS the computer comes with is a part of the computer. Normal people don't upgrade OSes unless the OS itself railroads them into it (which Win10 already does aggressively whenable), or they buy a new PC that happens to come with it pre-installed. The knowledge required to negotiate an OS wipe and reinstall is not something most people possess, and I expect presenting that knowledge to them on a silver platter is something they'd hastily recoil from.

We're in a catch-22 here. Even if all the pieces for the fabled Linux Desktop are arguably here, actually getting it into the hands of those who would benefit from it most remains prohibitive.

This is also ignoring the elephant in the room: A massive swath of these Windows PCs (Maybe even most of them? I have no backing figures, just a hunch.) are not personal computers, but office PCs that belong to a company fleet. There's a reason Windows utterly dominates the office--Windows rules the IT sphere, at least where personal devices given to employees are concerned. Active Directory? Group Policy? Come on, guys. None of the companies who depend on these management tools are pivoting to Linux anytime soon, and you know it. And if their cheap, bulk order desk PCs don't support Windows 11, they are absolutely getting landfilled.

The only effective mitigation I could think of would be to start a charity that takes obselesced office PCs, refurbishes them to Linux, and provides them at low or no cost to those who need a low cost or free PC. It would get Linux into more hands, but it would also strengthen a stigma that Linux is nothing more than the poor man's OS. The Dr Thunder to Window's Mountain Dew.

Honestly? Still haven't found one.

The communities I've found are all fine, but I haven't found any that are a tailor match for me. Every one so far has either been not quite my cup or a ghost town.

I'm mostly sticking to All and interacting with posts I like as I see them, with no real care given to what community they are from. Individual communities don't have much for me, but all of Lemmy combined holds my interest decently well.

I feel like I've invited everyone in my family to go on a great, grand vacation away and I'm the only one who's packed.

From their perspective, you're the fringe idealist who wants to move to a strange, remote place because of nebulous political ideology they neither understand nor wish to understand. And you are proposing that they uproot all of their preexisting social connections, support infrastructure, comfort, and familiarity to come live with you out in the middle of your scary, unfamiliar dystopia. Or, at least, force them to book a redeye flight and stay at a suspect hotel every time they want to visit you.

And honestly, you really are the fringe idealist here. Look at where you are posting this. Look at how few of us there are. Look at how many hoops you needed to jump through to set up what you have now. I certainly don't think you're wrong to champion privacy-focused ideals, but it absolutely is, strictly speaking in a populist context, extremely weird. It is weird to want to understand computerized tech, to know what it actually does, and to make bold, against-the-grain choices based on that knowledge. This is the unfortunate reality, and you have to make your peace with it.

I really do think your option is binary here. Join 'em, or cut 'em. Once you've shot your shot to convince someone to be more consciencious of their privacy and to take action to better secure it, and they frustratingly decline, that's it. They are not coming with you. Further pressing the issue will just drive a wedge between the two of you. At that point, the choice is yours. What's stronger, your willingness to stay conected, or your principles? Are you so rigidly disciplined that you're willling to cut ties (at least, through these channels) just to keep it? If so, I guess that's just a reflection of how much your principles really mean to you. If not, well, it's SMS/RCS and Google Docs for you.

If the current tools work fine, have decades of historic support and battle testing, and the alternatives offer little to no net benefit, uhh, why?

Lemmy not pulling in Reddit's general audience and Lemmy having a better user experience than Reddit are highly correlated.

It's 2023. If you're not using an IDE or a highly extensible text editor with simple static analysis features, I really don't know what to tell you.