I’ve also got the Linux Basics for Hackers book but it’s at home while I’m on vacation.
I’m just really happy rn yall :) this install took some work, SecureBoot kept getting in the way and I’m not the most savvy person so there was a lot of Googling and trial and error in the way of getting here.
Welcome! Don’t listen to anyone trying to shame you for your distro choice. The most important is that you didn’t choose windows.
Thanks! I plan to experiment with others, but I wanted a nice smooth transition for my wife and I both, so Mint seemed like a great starting point.
Mint is rad. I currently use barebones Debian testing with a bunch of customized stuff, but I always keep a bootable Mint flash drive on my keychain. It’s a very solid choice
I used Mint for almost its entire existence so far, but recently I’ve started main driving immutables, and gotta say the experience is even more user friendly. That’s my current experimentation stage but, so far, it doesn’t feel experimental at all, it just works out the box, no issues.
I agree that’s why I don’t listen to all the hater’s who say my distro Choice of Android Tv is bad.
Your distro of choice is a good distro unless you chose anything other than TempleOS
You’ll probably be making lots of changes to your computer over the next couple of weeks, so it’s a good idea to use TimeShift to make system snapshots. (It works like System Restore in Windows). It can even rescue an unbootable system. Just boot from your Linux Live CD / flash drive and you can run TimeShift from that.
Quick tip: forgot how to use a command? Use
man commandnameto see a short manual page for that command.Forgot sudo on your command?
!!refers to the previously typed command, so you can simply typesudo !!to fix it.
Also, don’t forget manuals have pages lol. I forget how many there are. 99% of the time you just need page 1.
tldr or teeldeer is the short manual. fwiw
wtfgives the summary, and works for acronyms too.
I went back and forth for about six years.
Then I began using Linux on a home NAS, then using the host GPU for virtualization, then proton… and when proton hit, that was basically.
Yep! Packing my shit! We’re going to penguin land!
Congrats! Made the switch finally early this year myself, after thinking about it for nearly twenty years. Hasn’t been nearly as hard as I was worried it would be.
I will say that the “Linux Basics for Hackers” is a pretty disappointing book that really should just be called “Linux Basics”, and spends too much time pandering with things like “cool” scripts that do nothing useful or wrap a simple command in a way that doesn’t actually make it more useful or easier. It’s also full of inaccuracies and just isn’t very well written, and if you’ve gotten through much at all of How Linux Works, you’re not likely to get anything out of it.
Congratulations! It’s really fun to learn something new. Don’t let anyone distro shame you.
(Unless it’s into installing Gentoo)
You picked some really good books to get started with! Lot of online help these days!
I reccomend trying TUI utilities to get better at Linux for example: btop, fastfetch, ranger, vim, and apt (also ignore anyone who tells you to sudo rm -rf /*)
I just learned about btop and nvim, I’ll check those out :) thanks
Heres some other cool utilities: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
lucky for you, my laptop in its entirity is unsupported by the linux kernel (msi gf63 thin 9sc)
“I’m just really happy rn yall” - be careful with that rn command if you’re anywhere near Arch, wouldn’t want all your happy uninstalled! Seriously though, good for you! Welcome to freedom.
Worth reading
Schotts provides a free ‘internet edition’ .pdf of TLCL, last updated 11/1/2024:
Hey thanks
That’s pretty awesome, thanks!
Good job, welcome to the free world of tech. Installing is often the hardest part.
Next lesson: forget about downloading installer from the browser, check out the software center or learn package manager commands, that’s the first new thing about Linux.
Welcome! I have been using Mint many years now its a gold standard distro you made a solid choice.
Hell yeah!! Welcome, fellow penguin. 🐧
Be mindful that Linux changes faster than a lot of books. I would stick to online documentation.
Schotts actually provides TLCL for free, and last updated it a month ago:
Those books were published in 2019 and 2021. They’ll still be mostly accurate a decade from now. Open-source developers usually try not to introduce breaking changes to mature software unless absolutely necessary.
Documentation is not the proper place for an absolute beginner to learn (unless it explicitly has tutorials, and even then they’re not always great).
Books will teach the essentials: my core UNIX knowledge comes from an SVR4 book I read in the late 2000s (a decade or more after it was relevant) and it’s still applicable today
