Gotcha. Well, I guess being an old guy and having never correlated someone’s computer background to any kind of meaning other than they like that particular background, I guess I don’t see anything into it. But hey, I work with a bunch of terminals all day long so there’s not an opportunity to customize things there, and the one work machine that has a gui, I have just left the background as the default. That is a rule of mine, nothing personal on the work laptop.

younger me would’ve freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files

That’s good for starters. What do you mean by “younger me would’ve freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files”? Exactly what proprietary files are you talking about? Background pics are usually jpeg, or png, and those are not proprietary to linux, so I think that’s part of what has everyone confused about this. Are you also insinuating that people can only use certain backgrounds based on either belief or their own actual background? I am curious to hear your explanation if you aren’t a llm. And by the way, saying you don’t use chatgpt is exactly what I would expect chatgpt to reply with. LOL. I keed I keed.

When you say ‘younger me’ do you mean like four year old you, because eight year old current you doesn’t make sense? I have no idea what the whole point of this post is, other than it must be some chatgpt output someone thought would be funny to throw out.

If you have time to not use the drive, you could use badblocks to test it. I usually use it with -svn as the options. s=Show progress, v=Verbose Mode, and n=Non destructive read/write mode,

I see your edit, and would like to comment that you also haven’t mentioned which rpi you were going to try this on. I recently wanted to set up a quick little pc using a rpi, just so I could browse the web and maybe watch some videos. Tried a rpi2 I had laying around. No way. Moved to a rpi3, and while it would load most pages, youtube was a bust as it completely maxed out the ram and swap. I then went to a rpi4 with 8gb and it has been doable, kind of. Sometimes it’s pretty choppy with the video, but basic web browsing is ok. I did try my plex the other day through the browser and it was barely acceptable. Lots of stuttering and sometimes just hangs, but that’s not the ideal way to view plex on anything. Haven’t tried my rpi5 yet, but my point to all this is that I think you are on the right track setting it up on a spare pc he has. If you had given him a rpi as a ‘desktop’ replacement it might have just soured him on the whole idea.