pixelscript

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 , 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.

It stops bot FARMS from being feasible.

If preventing Jimmy Bumfuck from spinning up a couple sock puppets is your fear, yeah, PoW systems don't help. But those are rarely the problem.

For a phishing scam or astroturf operation to be worth it, you need tens of thousands of accounts all running the same script. Those get filtered hard by PoW systems.

Phone validation works just as well, and stops Jimmy Bumfuck from making sock accounts. But now every user must be stapled to a phone number. Maybe that's a worthwhile trade to you, but it sure doesn't seem to be to everyone replying to you.

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...

I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.

Pretty sure what they meant is no distros where you have to manually curate and possibly even build every sodding package, like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and maybe to an extent Arch. I presume they want a disto that flashes to a live USB, walks through a wizard, and boots up out of the box fully functional in minutes, no fuss required.

Yeah, the notion that "cut" and "delete" are the same operation was an interesting hurdle. It's quite elegant, honestly.

The only thing it disrupts is the situation where you want to copy something, delete a second thing, then paste the first thing. Oops! Too bad! It's gone now!

I'm aware we do have access to multiple registers in Vim, effectively giving us many clipboards to bypass this, but I don't know the commands to utilize them. Without that knowledge, this little quirk remains an occasional irritation. Just not irritating enough to motivate me enough to knuckle down and learn it.

I can never reliably cut/copy and paste what I want in Vim. I'm always either picking up or leaving behind stray characters at the edges of my visual selection, because I find the end cursor so counterintuitive.

Especially true when newlines are involved, it's always a mystery how many newlines I'll paste into my document when I hit p to put.

This is not Vim's fault, it's just skill issue.

Oh, and it's also a mystery whether the system clipboard will work properly with Vim out of the box or not. There's some voodoo setting you have to tweak if it doesn't.

I like VIM as a casual user.

I barely know any of the fancy shortcuts, never successfully used a macro in my life, can't remember how to open more than one edit buffer and have to look it up every single time, and I still constantly wrongfoot copy and paste regularly to the point where I consider it a waste of my time to try and I just type things out the long way. I totally get why people feel very defeated by this editor.

But I do feel very slick darting around with hjkl, occasionally throwing in a gg or a G or a $ to leap around. Yeah, there are faster ways to get where I want if I'd only learn them, and I may some day, but this gets me around. If you can build up just the basic movements, that's enough to at least begin to appreciate the editor.

Not having to touch my mouse to edit text is a massive game changer that is worth it on its own. Not that vim is the only one that offers this benefit, of course. But what it does well that I haven't experienced in editors I've tried is how beautifully it flows if you happen to already know how to touch-type. Y'know, hands on the homerow, certain fingers hit certain keys, building up the muscle memory so you don't have to look at the keyboard to type, all that. It's why vim uses hjkl to move the cursor--it's where the right hand rests in a touch-typist position.

If you don't use keyboards this way, vim will probably ruin you. I know a lot of people who are proficient typists who never learned standard touch typing, instead home-rolling their own cursed setup that works for them, and god bless them, but they would be hard-pressed to negotiate vim. If this is you, vim may not be the editor for you.

/)