The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[OfeliaMorgan]

I have great interest in Linux. I would like to learn it. How can I do that? Thank you so much!

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

I have great interest in Linux. I would like to learn it. How can I do that? Thank you so much!

Start from the safety zone with Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and MX Linux. I'd recommend MX Linux for overall legacy hardware support and ease of use for deeper system tweaks. Get cozy with the terminal and learn how to add and remove packages without the GUI, and consider using bash scripts to automate things and make your life easier.

Useful tutorials playlist.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

I have great interest in Linux. I would like to learn it. How can I do that? Thank you so much!

You dive in butt first and learn as you go.

 

[no-exit]

You dive in butt first and learn as you go.

Agreed. I'm not a compsci nerd, I started using linux when I broke my W10 computer before a test, and panic installed ubuntu just for afternoon. Ended up never reinstalling windows, and after poking r/unixporn and learning about selfhosting, I learn a lot when I break stuff and try to fix it. Thankfully I have spare PCs, time and interest to poke around. I have a small library of non-academic casual ebooks from No Starch Press that I like too. DM me if you want a copies

Remember when XFCE was considered the lightweight option?

At least from my perspective, the advantage I see with XFCE is that it's far more modular than GNOME or KDE. Just installing KDEConnect pulls a fuckton of KDE dependencies, I imagine it's the same with anything GNOME related. Although, I dont think you can swap out X11 for Wayland yet on XFCE. I currently use AwesomeWM, but am considering checking out qtile + wayland. Am I missing out?

 

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An interesting read for Debian/Ubuntu users who use encrypted filesystems or just separate /boot partitions in general (as you should) and also use unattended-upgrades to keep updates flowing.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RemoveOldKernels

Apparently, there's actually a configuration flag, 'Remove-Unused-Kernel-Packages' to make this clean up old kernel versions rather than just dumping minor versions on your system until /boot fills up.

 

[OfeliaMorgan]

Start from the safety zone with Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and MX Linux. I'd recommend MX Linux for overall legacy hardware support and ease of use for deeper system tweaks. Get cozy with the terminal and learn how to add and remove packages without the GUI, and consider using bash scripts to automate things and make your life easier.

Useful tutorials playlist.

Thank you so much for your input here. I will definitely watch this video.

 

[OfeliaMorgan]

You dive in butt first and learn as you go.

Okey! Thanks

 

[Isam]

Start from the safety zone with Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and MX Linux. I'd recommend MX Linux for overall legacy hardware support and ease of use for deeper system tweaks. Get cozy with the terminal and learn how to add and remove packages without the GUI, and consider using bash scripts to automate things and make your life easier.

Useful tutorials playlist.

I'm sure that video is helpful for newbies, but besides being incredibly annoying he is either factually incorrect or misrepresenting many things.
Having watched the entire video it was utter garbage start to finish. It's not worth the storage required to host it nor the data transfer required to stream it. Read something useful instead https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

It's better to go for "shell scripting" rather than "bash scripting" as it's more compatible and the stuff specific to bash is not necessary, although many conflate "bash" with "shell".

 

[AmpleApricots]

Don't waste your time watching some youtube videos. The average information content of a 30 minute youtube video (especially on popular topics like yes, linux) can often be compressed down to a paragraph of good old text. Generally, the closer a topic is in that websoy/computertoucher-techie corner, the more worthless and plentiful the youtube videos become. Since they now even removed the dislike (so you could at least quickly filter the videos out that have nothing to do with the topic whatsoever) I don't even click youtube links anymore. Besides maybe some very rare, interesting videos nobody on youtube has anything to say about linux software you can't find elsewhere in a better format. The arch and gentoo wiki should have you covered for a glance at most troubleshooting stuff no matter what distro you use, otherwise I found the gentoo forums to be good for a quick search on more esoteric problems too if you can avoid the flamewars. Otherwise, just read the manpages. If the program is worth using, it usually has a good manpage these days. Or try google, if you want a poor and possibly outdated and wrong interpretion of the same manpage from some random webdev on stackexchange or reddit, although sometimes on some very simple things you already knew but kinda forgot and just want to quickly look up you usually can get lucky. Otherwise:

You dive in butt first and learn as you go.

this. It cannot be understated what a toilet large parts of the internet and internet search in general has become. Absolutely worthless. RTFM still reigns supreme.

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

Just dive into a desktop linux and google search everything you want to do. Like everyone said, learn the shell and the concepts of linux: packages, piping, etc. The basic concepts are the most important part. Archwiki is a good place for troubleshooting and documentation
Everyone has an opinion on desktop environment and I think KDE is good for beginners amd Gnome 3 is clunky unless you treat linux like OSX.

 

[PFM]

An interesting read for Debian/Ubuntu users who use encrypted filesystems or just separate /boot partitions in general (as you should) and also use unattended-upgrades to keep updates flowing.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RemoveOldKernels

Apparently, there's actually a configuration flag, 'Remove-Unused-Kernel-Packages' to make this clean up old kernel versions rather than just dumping minor versions on your system until /boot fills up.

Why the fuck isn't this the default behavior?

 

[eternal dog mongler]

It cannot be understated what a toilet large parts of the internet and internet search in general has become. Absolutely worthless. RTFM still reigns supreme.

It can generally be okay, for example, if you're searching an error message in a specific situation.

I was trying to compile a kernel module for openSUSE Leap which uses a very old kernel version with backported patches which is not a great combo, so I figured out how to edit the source files so they stopped checking my kernel version and just assumed it was new. That worked.

The open-ended questions though...yeah Stackexchange is really dumb now.

 

[saintJogger]

Thanks for the answers for everyone. I decided to go with Kubuntu as my first distro. Had to go to town today, so I picked up an extra SSD where I'll install it. I was too lazy to install that drive today, but I'll do it during the weekend. Dicked around with it a bit with the 'try it out' option on the install menu. By the way, https://unetbootin.github.io for USB media just works, because who has a CD drive these days? Well, I do, but I don't really like to use it when I can skip it with a USB drive.

The distro seemed to work like a dream. I was a bit worried I might have to wrestle with the shit phone internet connection that I share to the computer via USB because I live in the middle of the woods, or the weird USB audio setup that I have, but that all just worked right off the bat. Recognized all of my displays without any error. It's basically as easy as Windows. And it doesn't just start scrawling through my hard disks without any explanation when I haven't touched the mouse or the keyboard for two minutes. I could get used to this.

Only problem I had was that it didn't recognize the file system on one of HDD's, which is NTFS, just as the rest are, just 4TB whereas the rest are smaller. Could be because of the distro not being really installed, but I guess I'll see about that during the weekend.

 

[AnOminous]

It's better to go for "shell scripting" rather than "bash scripting" as it's more compatible and the stuff specific to bash is not necessary, although many conflate "bash" with "shell".

Anyone have any shell preferences other than bash?

Why the fuck isn't this the default behavior?

You might find some old package you don't often use can't deal with the new kernel and is no longer updated. So I suppose you could use it as a ghetto version control system of sorts. It's pretty Unix-ish to dump enormous files on the drive for no particular reason and then just never get rid of them, i.e. core dumps, voluminous log files, etc.

If you don't like them it's usually fairly easy to turn them off or write (or paste from somewhere else) little janitorial shell scripts to go around dumping this stuff. Personally, I'd like to keep maybe two or three past versions in case an update really screws the pooch.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Anyone have any shell preferences other than bash?

I want to dry Dash, though I am also trying out Zsh at the moment. It looks pretty.

 

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Why the fuck isn't this the default behavior?

I believe unattended-upgrades is an Ubuntu project, so it probably does something REALLY SMART like uninstall all your kernel image packages and then update grub before installing the newest one. I'll give it a go anyway, what's the worst that can happen?

Anyone have any shell preferences other than bash?

pwsh

 

[hhaergenreyt]

Anyone have any shell preferences other than bash?

zsh with the fzf tab-completion plugin. it's the cat's pajamas

 

[Knight of the Rope]

Why the fuck isn't this the default behavior?

Why would it be? Default (read: normie) behavior for Ubuntu is to not click "Advanced Options->LVM" and just have a single, max size root partition, in which case filling up /boot probably isn't ever going to happen. And on the other side, if you're learned enough to be messing around with LVM and a separate /boot partition, it's not a stretch to expect that you can simply typesudo apt-get autoremove --purge to get rid of old kernels you don't need (or automate the job if you're lazy), especially when the update process literally tells you as much after you've run an upgrade that included a kernel update.

ETA: While I'm here, proof:


Not to mention there's often good reason to keep a couple old kernels handy for rollbacks just in case anyway, and trying to figure out what an 'old kernel' is when your criteria for what constitutes an 'old kernel' is usually something nebulous like "the last one that just worked perfectly with my bluetooth headset which I would've used for my Zoom meeting in September, goddammit" means there's no real way to know how many old ones you'll want to keep around. It's a 'too-hard basket' problem, so why bother when you can just keep all of the old kernels around and let the end-user (if they even care, and recall that the majority of Ubuntu users won't even notice) sort it out themselves?

 

[ellroy]

Why the fuck isn't this the default behavior?

During my days of running Scientific Linux and CentOS 6 has my desktop OS, I have had to revert kernel upgrades before. 6.3 was the roughest phase and pushed me out of Scientific Linux and into Fedora. I have had to use an older kernel once with Centos in the 6.5-6.7 days. It was nice to select an older kernel to boot and figure out how fucked the system was.

 

[PFM]

During my days of running Scientific Linux and CentOS 6 has my desktop OS, I have had to revert kernel upgrades before. 6.3 was the roughest phase and pushed me out of Scientific Linux and into Fedora. I have had to use an older kernel once with Centos in the 6.5-6.7 days. It was nice to select an older kernel to boot and figure out how fucked the system was.

I totally understand the need for a few extra older kernels, I should've been more clear. I've had Ubuntu flip out and not let me update because my /boot is full of old kernels.