Apple by this time next year: We need to epoxy the entire airspace inside the new iphone because.. waterproofing? Sure waterproofing I promise that's why we did that.

The typical distro's installer will just take care of setting up GRUB for you, don't worry about that. I'm doing something similar with my home partition, except I made a home partition with all the expected user folders ~/Videos ~/Documents ~/Music ~/Games etc and then used overlayFS which keeps ~/.config/ and the like separate for each OS partition while letting me share everything else.

Can I partition /home directory in a different drive and still function?

Yes, easily done.
Open KDE partition manager
Create your new partition in whatever filesystem you like. NTFS can be problematic.
Now copy the contents of /home to the new partition.
Once it's transferred you can delete the contents of /home, or it will interfere with mounting from the new partition.
Now open KDE partition manager again to set the mountpoint of that partition to /home and check "automatically mount on boot"

You can easily repeat this process to move everything to your new new drive later.

In future if you install linux again, you can do this in the installer by simply telling it to mount X partition as Y mountpoint, even saving all your user files across installs!

I hope this sentiment never stops someone from uploading a textbook without OCR. Once it's scanned it can always be OCRed at a later time.

Apparently I'm wrong and Pop_Os uses systemD-boot not GRUB, which is surprising to me because unless things have changed I've always thought of systemD-boot as being underpowered for a lot of use cases.

If I'm reading the wiki correctly here, I think it's saying systemd-boot cannot launch windows because it's on another drive? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Boot_from_another_disk

But on the other hand it's interesting that it's able to "see" the windows partition so I might be completely wrong.

Well it's there at least. Hmm. I don't know a whole lot about windows but you can certainly get back to those boot options you saw before by pressing shift while booting, which will open the GRUB options. I'd give the windows boot manager another shot from there.

If that ends up working you can change the grub settings to wait for input instead of automatically booting pop. If that doesn't work then something is probably wrong with windows and I would just try reinstalling since it sounds like you don't have anything on there yet.

From Pop_OS, if you launch the "disks" program, can you see the other drive there, and the NTFS windows partition on it?

This reminds me of one of the best bits from the Xanth novels, where the male unicorns peacock for the female unicorns by leaping in the air and landing horn-first in the ground, then see who can balance like that the longest.

Which is second only to the part in the same book where the main character is taking a shit in the woods when a harpy shows up and he has to try to run away with his pants down, unwiped, while the harpy is shouting abuse after him

This "you can't Forward your own ports" shit needs to be made illegal. It's cutting off your ability to run your own service and making everyone a passive consumer on the Internet if you aren't one of the big tech companies.

Is it a linux box, and if so would you be able to ssh into this box? You could rename them that way right?

Depending on how old it might be another method. Some have a switch somewhere, or a specific screw. Check out mrchromebox's page.

And yeah you just boot it with the battery disconnected once and it disables the write protect!

And if you open it up and unplug the battery, then boot off the charger that disables the write protect and you can install actual linux, though a lot of chromebooks have unique hardware that might not be supported, particularly audio IME.

I used to have a dell chromebook 11, and with bitmap fonts it was actually a pretty slick little computer for <$100.