I dislike having the hyphens key as a dead key

Yeah, that sucks. You can have the best of both worlds in Linux by using the US keyboard with the “English (intl., with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard variant. This way, all your qwerty keys will work normally, but you can tell it a key combination is coming up by tapping AltGr. So you can for instance type <AltGr> + <"> + <u> to make ü or <AltGr> + <s> + <s> for ß. If I remember correctly, there is a way to make Windows do the same.

And in KDE at least, you can use any key you like to perform the function of AltGr. I suppose other DE’s can do the same.

I remember I had over one hundred floppies to install it all. And those were just for the stuff I was interested in. This was circa 1996. I bought Red Hat 5.0 a year or so later. It came on 4 CD-ROM’s and was cheaper than that pile of floppies had been.

My son’s Windows laptop did the same. Turns out there is a setting to make Windows truly shut down when selecting “shut down” from the menu, because normally it secretly sleeps or hibernates or something to have faster start-up times. There’s also the power another device via USB option that you may have to disable in BIOS / EFI settings.

So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.

This is no joke. When I downloaded Slackware in '95 or '96, it was over 100 3.5" floppies of 1.44 MB each. And there were still more available, those were just the ones I thought I’d need. And before you could even begin installing, each of those had to be downloaded, written and verified because floppies were not terribly reliable.

Transferring /home directory without reinstalling Linux?

After running low on storage space on Windows 10 I have considered upgrading to a larger drive, 2-4 TiB. With my switch to Linux I’d like to know if there is an easy way to take all my files from my previous drive into the new one with all the correct paths configured, without reinstalling Linux?

I can see this meaning a number of different things:

1. you want to move your home directory to a separate partition: You can just create a new partition and move your stuff there. People have suggested rsync, and that’s fine. Personally, I’d use mc (midnight commander) for that because it’s easier.

2. you want to know how to transfer your future home partition to a future bigger drive: You could do as above, or you could use clonezilla for that.

3. you want to transfer files from your old Windows setup to your new Linux system: You can just mount an NTFS partition and do as described under point 1. I’d be wary to write to an NTFS partition, but reading from it works just fine.

Eventually people will have to get new hardware. That’s the moment to avoid nVidia, that’s how simple this can be.

Also, the problem is nVidia giving shitty Wayland support, not Wayland providing no nVidia support. It’s nVidia who has to write the drivers since they themselves opted to keep their implementation details a secret. There’s nothing the Wayland people can do except plea, beg and shame. If nVidia then decide not to care, then I say fuck them.

That’s correct. It’s not just limited to computers or only two devices though.

And if you plan on trying different distributions, use Ventoy. It will create a bootable USB memory stick that you can copy your various ISO files to. When booting from it, you can then select which ISO to boot. Saves you from overwriting the same memory stick time and time again. Or having multiple memory sticks, one for each ISO.

Press ctrl+alt+esc. The cursor will change into a red skull and when you click a window, the process running it will be instakilled. Press esc again to cancel. That’s much better than going through task manager, finding the right process and then killing it.

Use vimtutor. It comes with vim and teaches you to the basic vim commands from within vim.

And don’t worry about exiting vim, that’s lesson 1.2 :)

As for booting from USB stick: use Ventoy for that. It allows you to copy any number iso files to the USB stick and boot from any iso file that’s on it. No need to go through the hassle of writing an iso to memory stick over and over again.

If nothing else, the smiley can be taken as a hint that it’s not serious.