Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there’s more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.
In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.
And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.
So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there’s more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON’T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!
shoutouts to tux
Someone told me to RTFM. I later realized that was good advice. (I learned by reading documentation)
It should be the other way around.
I didn’t learn Linux. I was born in it, molded by it.
Plot twist: there’s books and classes on just about everything
No, people who refuse to read books or take a course from someone who might know what they’re doing are inferior!
Then there’s me who didn’t learn it, I just use it
It warms my heart that after your journey you realized there is still so much more to learn.
Many would leave it there and call themselves an expert
I learned about the existence of Ubuntu from a computer magazine and tried out the live USB soon after. It took me many years of sporadic trial and error, but then the Wayland session started becoming really good on NVIDIA GPUs, games started having less issues (and I got it though my head that NTFS causes tons of problems), and I eventually learnt enough, that I stopped missing Windows. I kept an install around for racing sims and just-in-case for years, but I got Assetto Corsa working more or less reliably and it became redundant. I deleted my Windows partition a couple of weeks ago.
I learnt from trial and error, a few videos, a few articles, and the Arch Wiki. A friend is hounding me to try NixOS, and I want to get familiar with Fedora to convert a few relatives, but right now it’s looking like Arch 4ever for me.
Im just waiting till shit breaks and then panicking like a normal person
The fact that Linux is so easily reinstalled has really been a hinder in my journey towards learning to actually fix the problems that would prompt a reinstall.
Over decades I have come to love the dark crypt of arcane spells that is GRUB rescue env.
I love that your friend told you about it. Everybody needs friends like that.
About 20 years ago a friends dad saw potential in Linux and bought us one of those fat learn linux books with a cd on it. We read a little, tried installing it, but all we wanted to really do is play Age of Empires (so we reverted to Win xp)
Now im diving in and learning linux hands on again for fun, 4/6 computers are now converted.
After 4 reinstalls and almost killing my already dead side computer, I finally know a thing or two about Fedora KDE Plasma.
Rawdogging gang represent!
I started in the late 90’s with a Mandrake CD from a magazine. No internet meant nothing more than “this is interesting but I can’t do anything with yet”.
Then in school we were given a PC, an internet connection and we burned a Debian 3 CD. I became expert at reinstalling it because at the time it was the “simplest” way to unfuck what I fucked up.
Then I just winged it at work and learned a lot.
Then I just moved every system at home to Linux. Never looked back.
Sometimes I feel I still know nothing. But then, when asked to do any administrative task on Winslop/macOS that I know can do in a few seconds on Linux, I feel so hapless and inefficient that I feel it must amount to something.
Pink guy should be “Me who asks Claude to fix the things I broke asking ChatGPT what to do.”
Ask chatgpt how to install a local model and quit stealing our water and paying a garbage company for garbage answers.
I assume their answer is taking the piss, but seriously tho. Local LLMs are amazing. I have one in my router whenever I need anything. Using them shows just how much you give away when you use cloud based ones because they will tell you what data they collect.
I waste no water and no electricity but my own and it feels good.
My answer was taking the piss, it at least I thought it was.
I learned that shit in the late 2000’s trying to get games to run on Ubuntu with wine. No real idea just lots of googling, trial & error, plus too much ADD to ever properly read a manpage 😅
Superuser and Askubuntu were revelations when they came around.
I cried tears of joy when Lord Gaben bestowed upon us a native Steam Linux client.
Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.
(* as long as you’re willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you’ve fucked up.)
Well that is like telling a developer who knew nothing about containers, kubernetes or the kernel cgroups are the best way to learn container tech.
I’m just comparing in terms of complexity. Not functionality. And yes they have fundamental concepts that helps. But that is not needed for everyone.
In other words, vast majority of the users don’t need to know the complexities of these things. A user friendly platform like Docker is all they need. We all know it is because of how good the developer tooling of Docker, was the major reason for the wide spread usage of containers.
Those who have interest, and like to explore more may take on kubernetes after learning Docker and fundamentals of containerisation.
I think so too actually if you’re looking to learn the basics.
Arch has very little actual “distribution” in its system (mostly pacman and mkinitcpio) and the former is a glorified tar with a database, and while it can run scripts, you’re expected to configure and set up everyone yourself using the upstream tools, and these usually come vanilla
I daily drove it for 15 years before I switched so it’s not like Arch is insured for that. But if you want to learn the basics of modern Linux it’s a good choice
Not this misleading shit again 🤦
Did you miss the “memes” in “linuxmemes”?
Besides, there is nothing misleading about it. I’ve learned more about Linux from breaking and then fixing my system than any course or tutorial could teach me. And that isn’t just knowledge, it’s real experience that I could apply professionally when one of our ancient Ubuntu servers crapped out.
For a beginner who is interested in learning how Linux works, Arch’s inherently higher requirement for technical skills (or the ability and willingness to develop those skills) may be more valuable than just having a stable and reliable system.
What the actual fuck does a package manager do?
Can you teach a package manager how to love?
