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

Damn, that's hard mode. I just used web search to figure things out. IDK whether that's still a viable method, though.

I recently had to restore a backup after a btrfs partition failed and became permanently read-only, and just for fun I tried to restore the backup of the broken partition to working order and read through tons of forums and spoke on the #btrfs libera chat with the experts and at the end of it this is my advice:

Do not use btrfs, use ext4 instead. btrfs failures are unrecoverable and they don't care.

I feel like most of us who got into linux in that era got to truly know it that way - tinkering with it, breaking things and figuring them out by ourselves. In my particular case we didn't had internet at home until late 2008 so even "simple" things like updating stuff was a real pain in the ass, though the ubuntu cds were salvation.

This is satire right? I'm a little confused.

For real. Some guy I knew introduced me to SuSE back when I was in highschool. It was great and all, but it made things easy by hiding details behind snappy GUIs. While I was in college, I started to realize I wasn't learning anything about Linux. So I took a deep breath and installed Gentoo. Switched to Arch for a while, but I'm back to Gentoo now. I wanted to learn more about how Linux really worked and holy shit did I get my wish.

Books? Surely you mean man pages.

Ain't no way I will ever try Gentoo. I don't even know what "compiling from source" means or what the difference between that an "binaries" are.

You know, it is shocking I work IT when I barely understand tech at all. Though to be fair I am a help desk guy. I have Google IT Support, ITIL 4 Foundation, CCNA, and Security+ so I know some stuff. Kind of. A bit.

I should just take that Linux+ class shouldn't I?

Around 2006 I watched a video on YouTube of a guy showing off Pendrive Linux booting from a USB drive and it blew my mind that you could run an entire OS from a lowly USB drive. I then made my own and used it to play games on the computers at my middle school and have been unfortunately addicted to Linux ever since. Later on in my 20s I took a Linux class in college and my professor was really impressed I already knew so much about Linux. 8 years of "brute forcing it" taught me quite a bit. Now I'm a jaded network administrator and have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

When I was younger, I actually liked it when my computer broke because I thought fixing it was giving me knowledge. I guess it did to some extent, but I'd rather my stuff just work now that I'm older.

I ran a software RAID5 via LVM2 and when a failure occurs it becomes some voodoo magic that not even the maintainers understand.

Lost 6TB of archives.

I had a somewhat similar introduction. My Windows XP ran into a blue screen on boot and I couldn’t afford tech support or a Windows CD to reinstall. This was well before I knew how to pirate software.

So one of the ladies in tech support at my high school recommended I try Ubuntu. I think it was version 8 at the time and had a really charming boot sound.

I was instantly hooked when I came across the GTK/Emerald theming options because I was big into RocketDock at the time but again couldn’t afford to buy it. When I found out you could customize everything all the way to the boot menu without hacking it, I spent the next six months learning the whole system to build it into a fully custom personal theme from boot to desktop.

It took until Proton hit its stride before I could finally daily it but I almost always had it available in the side on at least one or two of my computers.

Come on, nobody reads man pages. That's pathetic.

LOL Rawdogging Linux is INSANE; I did it through a bit of a cycle of reading, using my system, learning more. I still broke my systems but the fun part: I had a second HDD so all of my important bits were safe typically. I distro-hopped for years, mostly moving between openSUSE (older version and Tumbleweed), Ubuntu (started when it was 16.04), Fedora, Mint, Debian, Bazzite, Aurora, tried Artix briefly (the community is lacking). Finally settled on Garuda Linux, btw! Found something that suits my needs and I have enough knowledge that I haven't broken my system once...Heh, good times!

Mandrake and Winmodems.

Sounds like bs, maybe your specific problem was unrecoverable, in general they are.

Guess you learned, but the rules of backup are 3-2-1 with at least one offline (I count offline HDD as a different media type for 2, tape one day, maybe, seems painful), it's not a real backup until you've restored from it and, RAID is not a backup.

I've recently moved completely away from Windows on my personal devices. Running Bazzite on desktop PC (for games) and Mint on laptop (for performance). So far it hasn't been that different from Win10 in terms of daily use, but I've noticed fixing broken stuff is actually easier as the system finally treats me as the real owner of my PC. And Mint is treating my old laptop way better than either Win7 or 10.

That's neat. When I was in college I would carry a live USB thumb drive and would sometimes play games off of it, too, in the computer room of the business building. Also, I use Mint, too, since it works well for me.

One can absolutely not comprehend man pages without already having the experience working with various things

No need to take a class. Find a project you want to do and a engineer/system admin who's willing to mentor.

I started with Linux on a 2.0 kernel, in 1995 or 96. I only had one computer and there were no smartphones. There was no option besides rawdogging Linux. You pampered youngsters don't know how good you have it!

I rawdogged it. I learned almost everything [I might need] about it in the process.

I'm self-taught.

i learned by getting yelled at on irc

Similar timing, a friend introduced me to Ubuntu around 2005 or 2006 and dualbooted for a while and always had a live USB with me. Tried many distros, I think openSuse was my favorite for a while and then switched to OSX86 until I got a laptop at my job (with windows) and I got a tablet so I stopped having a personal computer until about 5 years ago when I got a very cheap laptop that turned to crap when it "upgraded" to Windows 11 and that's when I discovered linux

My biggest issue with self learning is that I used chmod 777 to try to fix everything since most of the time it "worked"

I learned a lot of stuff by raw dogging it and really envy people who took courses or had tutors or mentors (for any hobby/skill)

God forbid a man be sincere. What would I even be satirizing?

bit of a ridiculous sentiment when there's so many guides for stuff online that I wouldn't know which category to put myself in. I definitely didn't take classes nor read books on it, yet I absolutely took a guided approach.

you could always go for LPIC, the books/courses tend to be quite cheap and the exams usually are cheap as well

LPIC will provide you with a stable foundation that you can venture out from on your own

have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

Using a Fedora spinoff (Nobara, because it had install mediums for PCs with NVidia GPUs and a lot of gaming specific things prepared out of the box) for a similar reason. I need an OS that is cutting edge enough to play the latest games, but not so cutting edge that it is prone to sudden disintegration after an update.

Damn, we’ve been raw dogging it for a couple years now. No dual booting though. On cachy now

Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.

(* as long as you're willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you've fucked up.)

I love this meme 🤣. I kinda did both. So good.

reading books? meh. reading docs? fun

I did it this way too, with a small debian home server/media center about 15 years back (i had another debian set up on my main rig about 20 years back, but since i am a gamer, i did not do much more than dabble a bit in it). After Proton became a thing and i was unwilling to switch to Win11, i installed Nobara. Since then i have learned a lot, and i even got myself some literature to learn about computers for the first time in my life (got a bundle of O'Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux and surrounding things for a good price)

Ah. The memories and trauma of Winmodems and Linux!

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 🤦

man, apropos, info...

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager

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.

❌ Fixing (your) computers for free

✅ Fixing (other) computers for money

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.

I don't even know what "compiling from source" means or what the difference between that an "binaries" are.

To make it simple:

"Source code" is readable human code which is a set of instructions you give to the computer, think of it like a tutorial the computer reads to do stuff

"compiling from source" is that act of making human readable code in to computer readable code, computers can only understand machine code, luckly compiling is automatic these days

"Binaries" are packages which contain all the compiled code ex: .exe or .bin files

Pink guy should be "Me who asks Claude to fix the things I broke asking ChatGPT what to do."

Can you teach a package manager how to love?

Oh! I thought you were implying difficult to learn linux. My bad.

I started using Linux a few years back. Feel the same here. It is like a never ending quest of figuring out things.

Such is life. Nah, I still use linux and now rather than dualbooting I have a dedicated DIRTY windows computer for all my online gaming and windows needs.

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.