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.

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.

I love that your friend told you about it. Everybody needs friends like that.

After 4 reinstalls and almost killing my already dead side computer, I finally know a thing or two about Fedora KDE Plasma.

Im just waiting till shit breaks and then panicking like a normal person

Plot twist: there's books and classes on just about everything

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

Ask chatgpt how to install a local model and quit stealing our water and paying a garbage company for garbage answers.

No, people who refuse to read books or take a course from someone who might know what they're doing are inferior!

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.

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.

My answer was taking the piss, it at least I thought it was.

Then there's me who didn't learn it, I just use it

It should be the other way around.

I didn't learn Linux. I was born in it, molded by it.

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.

Someone told me to RTFM. I later realized that was good advice. (I learned by reading documentation)

Thank you Microsoft for forcing me to learn how to use and maintain Linux.

I kinda started by rawdogging it, but it was just because I wanted to go further into my privacy journey and use Linux to get away from Windows telemetry. I knew to start on an easy kinda foolproof distro, so I picked Fedora Silverblue cause it's atomic. But after figuring out it's REALLY hard to tinker with when trying to use some slightly obscure software/make certain tricks work, I just switched to reg Fedora and never looked back.

A few months later I took a Linux course at my college, and I loved it, although it focused more on Cybersecurity and administration stuff rather than just basic Linux usage and how to get around. We we're solely in the terminal, nothing about LibreOffice or the like. It was also a Kali VM we were using, which makes sense for the purposes of the class.

But taking that class really made it easier for me to be confident with the CLI, and it also helped give me Ubuntu/Debian knowledge to make managing my Proxmox easier. So while I could've definitely "rawdogged it", having a structured environment to fuck up in but also get someone else to help you was great.

I learned by looking shit up on internet forums. Still kinda dawg shit at it though.

It was just my media rips. So to say it was "lost" is a bit dramatic I suppose. I just had to spend another two weeks re-ripping my DVD and Blu-ray collection to restore the lost archives. (Without the RAID this time lol)

You mean I can read books and take classes on eating ass!?

Back in the day tomsrtbt was similarly inspiring. It could boot from a single 3½" floppy. Always kept one around as a rescue disk.

No, but apt can moo

You shouldn't have to take a class for an operating system...

.deb is more akin to .msi no? it's a self-contained package file which contains the components to install an application, not a binary executable itself.

Oh yeah, my bad, i gotta fix

Did you know? Typing man tool in your web browser will bring you several websites with online manpages for tool and an useless AI overview on the top!

I generally find O'Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux to be really useful! It's a perfect way to learn the fundamentals, personally I haven't gone too deep into computers yet. As that is going to happen when I learn more about C programming as it will be important then! Right now, I don't have to go too deep into computers, as I am learning more about Python. So my Linux learning tends to relate on how you manipulate the system via terminal and fix weird ass problems that can happen sometimes!

I mean, probably. But doing it seems more fun

...So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?

I've had windows classes in school, I've later learned how to configure Windows and Linux servers. Windows starts simple and isn't easy to customize away from the default configuration. Linux starts difficult but doesn't grow as quick in complexity. Both shouldn't be configured that far by most users though and the basic usage of both has similar complexity.

Why do you think an operating system shouldn't have classes? From what I'm hearing around the workplace(though thats biased) more people should have basic computer knowledge and they even get training time allocated for in-house training courses.

You shouldn't have to take a class for an operating system...

...So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?

Invalid inference.

If you want to take a class on a system to get into the stuff under the hood, that's fine, but you shouldn't have to take a class for like, basic operations. Saying "this starts difficult and stays that way" isn't a good selling point for people to use your system.

invalid reply?

Can you use more than two words to explain your point? The only operating system I know that can be used by most people without teaching them the usage is Android and Chromeos and some similar mobile platforms, maybe MacOS though I don't see enough people starting on that platform to know if it's intuitive or not.

Of course people can also figure out the usage over time but that's more by trying out what works and seeing what does what and most people just give up before they get that far.

Saying "this starts difficult and stays that way" isn't a good selling point for people to use your system.

Both shouldn't be configured that far by most users though and the basic usage of both has similar complexity.

Edit: To be honest the actual difficulty of a system also depends on what you do with it. Windows at work and Linux at work both require only a basic understanding of how to use the OS to use effectively. Basic usage and restarting it if something isn't working correctly. At home you're more involved with actually installing the software that you use, the system settings and Updates/when they happen. Linux makes installing software safer due to the repos preventing the easy virus downloads and windows makes drivers for some windows only hardware work without complex setup. Assuming we're buying a PC that ships with Linux drivers will work though that's what I assume your average person using Linux would use (as in the average person uses a PC with the OS it is shipped with).

You can use it without learning additional skills, but to truly know what's going on with any operating system that requires higher knowledge. I'm including windows, mac, android, linux, etc in this. If we could fully understand technology by touching it tech support wouldn't need to exist. Nor would the insane number of overpriced certifications.

fake it 'til you makebreak it.

Yeah, I would imagine most classes would concentrate on supporting headless server systems over learning any particular gui. They're more the kind of thing meant to be put on a job application than to teach for personal use.

Linux almost needs continuing education courses. New shit comes out, and if you don't try it in the next 5-7 years, you'll end up getting it anyway.

It was either that or study the material for grad school.

I also started with Mandrake! I couldn't believe something so great could be completely free!

I was like 13 when I installed Red Hat and I totally needed to use the book it came with because I had no idea what I was doing.

not only i rawdogged linux, i used a rolling distro with a lot of questionable security decisions (eherm.... Manjaro) during grad school.

... no idea how that laptop survived grad school but it did...

You don't need to read books, most stuff can be found in the Arch Wiki

Well the first time I ran Linux was in 99-2000, before I had proper internet (one needed to buy these prepaid dialup cards and winmodems wouldn't work on Linux), so actually had to buy a book 'The Linux Bible'. Used that book a lot, especially in the early days to troubleshoot LILO (Before GRUB) bootloader and configure dual boot. Of course, once internet was readily available, online search / forums replaced those books. Last book I bought was about redhat/mandrake rpm packaging.

Ah yes the college of "Fuck it, we ball".

DSL! Such a classic.

Basic computer knowledge is the answer here. Concepts in OS'es and software are reused over and over and are common to most vendors/platforms. Partitions/Partitioning.. etc. All basic knowledge. The fine details don't make sense without it.

yeah EFI booting solved a lot of boot problems and made them fixable in a way they never were with legacy BIOS

Yes, there are classes, but it's corporate Linux. Dockerfiles, AWS, shit like that.

Anyways:

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

Well, it doesn't matter much, actually.

If you actually wonder, it's a database (can be sqlite, tho most write their own which involves it's own set of quantum physics and mathematics for operations) of stuff that's installed and stuff that's available. "Updating repos" downloads the list of stuff and their dependencies. Actually installing involves it downloading an archive, extracting it, looking at some special file that describes it (list of files, version, hash...), doing verification stuff, checking if dependency constraints are met (again, involves database mathematics...), adding the info of the package to the "installed" database then just extracting the entire archive EXCEPT the describing/meta/special/whatever file(s) right into your root. Or whatever you told it is root.

You can make a tiny bootable Linux by literally extracting some critical packages from, for example, Alpine Linux, using your average GUI archive viewing tool.

OpenRC & SystemD

"Well, the difference being, one is a j*b and the other is mental sickness" - RED Sniper, Team Fortress 2

OpenRC is an init system. It's a system that starts (inits) different programs meant to be ran all the time (daemons).

SystemD is a suite of software. It has a few fucktons of components. Although in the context of an init system they mean the init system SystemD comes with. It may not be that bad by itself, but the other components are often poor in quality and/or resource heavy. Most distributions ignore most of them by default. And yet, everything is relying on them to the point where people who don't want the entirety of SystemD had to rewrite SystemD's components for themselves, and not the other way around.

Wayland

Protocol with a few fucktons of extensions, like X11. For putting stuff on a screen.

Difference is that X11 has functions for drawing lines and circles and shit and everything kinda went around that, which is useful with 2D accelerated hardware (if you enable it in the driver) but everything really recent (2016?) isn't so it's pointless there. It's also decades old. And window manager (and often compositor, thing doing transparency effects and stuff) is separate.

The very base of Wayland is basically a program asking for a new window and then it just has to draw stuff there itself, while extensions handle stuff like negotiating clipboard. (spoiler: if you don't have a clipboard manager there is no "clipboard", pasting something asks the program you copied from so if you closed that you don't have it). It also has HDR. Shitty but HDR. Unfortunately the progress on that is slow, because it's the @redhat.com email people dictating all the specs and making countless meetings about them of course, and everyone else just sits and listens to their bullshit. Oh, and server/compositor/wm is all one single program (although a project called "wlroots" provides most of the "server" part as a piece of code devs can copy paste). Anyways, KDE Plasma/kwin is the most feature complete server out there, although I personally "outgrowed" from it if that makes sense

Hyprland

Some kid made a Wayland server. Pretty ok quality (!!! relatively). Originally wlroots but later it's own thing ("hyproot"). It's meant for "eyecandy" shit setups, not a fan of that, ew gross, although to each their own kinks. BUT to get the stereotypical """eyecandy""" one has to either (1) spend their entire free time on fucking with configuration files and installing everything or (2) get someone else's giant ass script which compiles stuff from 16 guthib repos and then freshly extracts you a 2 gig .config directory. Lots of the time people end up turning their bar/desktop/whatever into a fucking web browser, like it's MicroWin from SoftDows. Knowingly or from a dependency for some stupid AUR package that doesn't read like it would do that by name, like "hyprpanel-git". I am not going to link an example of the dependency, it's aylur<dot>github<dot>io<slash>ags if you really want to look at that. I hope moss grows on walls of everyone who did that knowingly and actually liked it.

As for me personally, I used it for a while for it's HDR support but just never installed a bar or anything. Turned off the shaders, the wallpaper, the splash, the rounding stuff, the borders, and... "Hey, get me a Hyprland with NOTHING". So yeah. Later there was some really fucking annoying shrodenbug, I rage quit and switched to sway-git. It also has HDR nowadays, tho you gotta bind keys for turning it on/off because screensharing sucks. Just like at "home", on WinSoft from MicroDows.

20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING

Never too late I guess.

You mean, YELLED at?