Over the years of using Windows (2010-2023), I don’t remember learning anything at all, only using the command line twice, once to check the hard disk and once to clean the registry… I’m in love with Linux terminal.
Did you not learn anything because you simply did not need to, perhaps? Because you can do a lot if you need to.
I guess so.
I’m sure this will draw some criticism but I’ve found duck.ai to be extremely helpful in troubleshooting minor issues with my Linux mint installation and recently with accessing and understanding SMART hard drive diagnostic data. It’s very helpful in figuring out which commands could be useful in the terminal and in understanding exactly what each terminal command is doing. Of course finding answers in forums and manuals is still relevant and important but as a beginner, this has been a fast and easy way to get advice.
Just be careful to think twice before doing what it says. (That goes for any advice from the internet too!)
Like all the old stories of people’s GPS steering them into a lake. Let the GPS help you, but still, like, actually look at the road!
ETA: It’s probably quite reliable at explaining what terminal commands do, since it’s drawing from many manuals. But sometimes it might completely make up the answer, in a way that’s almost right but terribly wrong. You think the command does one thing, so you use it ‘appropriately’, but really it does something else so your carefully thought out use goes completely wrong.
That makes sense. It cuts through the RTFM bullshit, and gets you a clear answer without unnecessary ego.
Good point. I don’t know why I didn’t think about this sooner, i literally use it for other programming stuff.
Same with arson
What’s the Venn Diagram of “childhood pyromaniacs” and “Linux users” look like?
It’s just 1 circle with both labels in it.
You ever seen a really bad hemorrhoid?
Ok. Thank you. That’s enough internet for today.
God damn, dude! (☝︎ ՞ਊ ՞)☝︎
I only mean to say that the diagram would be one circle packed tightly inside a slightly larger one.
Hmm. Sounds like the Orange Orangutan fucking up the government: a hemorrhoid inside a hemorrhoid. 😎
Boom! Gottem.
Can confirm. Made many sparkler/aerosol can boom.booms
See, this is why you Linux users have a bad rep.
/s
And the less you use Windows, the worse you get at using it. Luckily the bar for Windows competency is pretty low, just basic critical thinking skills and Google get you far.
You can make that point for any operating system, basic critical thinking could mean anything
You could but you’d be drawing a false equivalency.
I got an equivalency for ya
Pb(s)+2 HCl(aq)→PbCl2(s)+H2(g)
Honestly, potentially the more you use Windows the worse you get at it. You come to accept the garbage, but the more you try to fix it the more it fights you and the less stable it becomes. A user who just doesn’t touch anything is probably better off.
basic critical thinking skills
My great-aunt would like a word with you.
/triggered/
Oh hell no. My basic critical thinking applied to googling has got me to a forum with the solution to wi-fi not working in the form of “meh, it happens. reser all network settings and reboot”. Which became my personal turning point of “fuck this shit, I’d rather have actually debuggable software”
/cooled down/
Well, your point read as “look at the problem, search for solutions and you probably will find them” stands, it is the low competency bar that triggered me: to even know where crash logs etc might be on Windows is far beyond even “power user” level
If you’re searching online for how to fix the problem… Couldn’t you also search online on how to find the crash logs? I fully get sometimes not having enough knowledge in a subject to even know where to begin searching, but “well, the first result wasn’t helpful, guess I’ll stop looking for an answer” and “it says to check XYZ, but I don’t know what that is. Too bad I don’t have a way to search for what things are” aren’t exactly difficult hurtles to overcome.
I could, if only I knew they existed :)
I only learned windows had system-level crash logs by reading someone’s post about many programs ignoring that and thus it being way less helpful than one might expect it to be, while on Linux it seems something that gets picked up quite early: the system can write “check logs using journalctl something-somethng”, vast number of posts asking to provide system logs with the commands to get them, various troubleshooting guides mentioning system logging. Though in the end this difference can be traced to difference in philosophies: neither microsoft, nor most authors of online guides have a habbit of troubleshooting things this way
What? It’s easy to find a solution to WiFi problems, come on.
Usually, sure, but mine was just that. It helped, so kind of solution anyway
Do you guys also keep a notepad file on your desktop with all the usual commands and shortcuts on it? I can’t imagine remembering them all otherwise… and I kind of cringe at the non stop DDG ing I have to do to do some basic liux stuff.
I use KDE, and I put a sticky note widget on my top bar, so when you click it, it drops down (and then disappears when you click off of it). Whatever is on it is saved between sessions.
Works great for this kind of thing.
Edit: I also put a webbrowser widget up there that points to this handy site: https://linuxcommandlibrary.com/
Same deal, click the icon and the site drops down.
I’m using my companies’ mediawiki personal user page to keep snippets and one liners that took me some time to cobble together. I export that regularly to a personal device, so, yes. I’ve found that I never look at it because once I’ve hammered something together I usually got the concept so next time it takes me a fraction of the time.
Yes.
Source: Am Systems Admin (engineer/architect/your mom)
This guy’s lucky to have such a good mum.
Remember to share your notepad with them, even if they’re all like, “mom, your bash usage is like from the '90s, so cringe!” Behind all the fuss, they’re still learning from you.
I use obsidian to make notes of how to install and setup applications from a fresh install, for example to install mariadb-libs when I install digikam so that I can use the mariadb database on my nas, and the way to mount my nas shares in fstab
Try a different shell, like fish or zsh, maybe. Something with really intense command auto-completion and history.
I personally use fish, it is amazing for this kind of thing.
ETA: also read up on rc files for whatever shell you are using. Creating aliases and functions based on what you do all the time is essential IMO.
No. Stuff I use more than once I just put in a shell file. I don’t really run much on the terminal besides those files and using it to update my system.
Sometimes I’m searching for a recipe to some obscure Linux tool and finding my own answers on Stackoverflow from ten years ago.
I ctrl-r my history and set the histsize to some ludicrous value
History is documentation enough.
Yup
No never even crossed my mind but ig I was also in a competition for Linux that required me to memorize basically every single command and option
Which is bullshit tbh, which in turn is why I don’t like LPIC. Even RedHat exams give you VMs with full manpages. Know concepts and know what to expect from which tool, everything else is wasted resources.
it’s a good os. on the other hand everytime i learned anything in windows it would get invalidated by new ux and new bugs…
Wait, you guys are getting better? /j
im still stuck in vi hell… help… cannot exit program
Have you tried standing up from your computer and going outside? It’s the only 100% reliable way I’ve found to exit vim.
Arson is also good.
I usually shut off the mains.
That’s why you install Emacs and never look back. Everything you need in one program. No need to exit at all.
I think there’s even an editor in there, at least one of the old greybeards at work said something to that effect.
There is, I’m pretty sure of it. But, I can’t remember where?!
There’s no exiting vi, gotta buy a new computer
Dude, just reboot the machine, as long as vi is not autostarting you should be good
I added vi to startup and I can’t modify my startup items because I can’t figure out how to save in vi
I’m sorry, but i can’t save you anymore. I promise to remeber you until my last day on earth
Is this what they call a boot loop?
The only thing i know about vi is how to exit it lol.
Shit, I’m trying to remember from just the memes. Was it something like :q! or am I misremembering it?
Yes,
:q!in normal mode to exit without saving changes.
All jokes aside, why do people even bother with vi?
Efficiency :3… if you need to edit text in terminal a lot, getting good with vi/vim can save a decent chunk of time, due to all the keyboard shortcuts it has
And then other people do it cause the pros do and it’s perceived as cool
Why is it better than just using nano or whatever?
Basically just the keyboard commands afaik. In vim you move through lines with hjkl keys instead of the arrow keys, and most commands are one letter (because it works through switching modes) instead of needing to hit ctrl for every one. In effect it lets you keep your fingers on the home row at all times which means you can more seamlessly go between moving around to typing, as well as minimizing having to stretch your fingers, so less hurting hands for long editing sessions
Personally I’ve not had enough of a need to use vim or vi or any of the other related text editors, so I can’t give more concrete examples, but ye :3… for most stuff and most people nano is gonna be good enough
People use Vim to look cool?
It’s a brave new World.
Well to look “nerd cool” cause admittedly if you even know vim you’re like a nerd x3
And about that, whats the best discords for linux people
It’s powerful, lightweight, and ubiquitous. If you do sysadmin work, remote into a random machine, and need to update a config file, it probably has vi installed already. It’s also extensible enough to use as a full IDE.
Personally, I like it because of how fast it feels and because I can do everything while keeping my hands on the home row of the keyboard.
Software developer here.
I only recently switched from vim to VSCode and I refuse to use any editor without vim emulation.
Regular expressions for quick and efficient and precise search and replace, modal editing which allows me to type di" to ‘delete inside current double quotes’ (needs vim-surround plugin), typing 123gg to go to line 123, press % to switch between any pair of marching braces, brackets or parentheses, and all sorts of such efficient goodies.
It’s not only efficient, vi has a whole concept, a philosophy how you can build quick editing commands. It’s not like remembering random shortcuts like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. Once you understand the language, it becomes second nature and you can translate something you want to do into 5 key strokes which would need 100 otherwise or would involve the mouse and clicking and selecting etc.
I’m not even that good at vim, I’m just using the surface features.
It has very good reasons why every notable editor provides some form of vi editing emulation.
Because especially for very low profile systems its more than enough, so you dont need to use something like vim or nvim.
Absolutely! I never break my system the same way twice.
Real :3
Though actually most of the stuff I had not work on my system was cause of flatpak permissions x3
If you haven’t already, try Flatseal, it’s a gui to deal w/ Flatpak permission (such a PITA).
The last time I broke my system, it was because I removed a folder called /home/monstrosity/home/monstrosity/.
When I deleted the weird duplicate home folder, it broke the entire desktop environment & I had to use the terminal to log in and reinstall. I have no idea which of my numerous ‘fucking around’ sessions caused any of it lol
I’m getting better at finding new ways to break my installation. Now I don’t mess with things and just use it as is. Might start messing with stuff on my laptop rather than PC so I can mess up there instead.
Not me! It’s been too reliable and everything that I need works fine without much effort at all, so I never get any experience troubleshooting or using the command line.
Based linux stability /hj
You’ll get to the point where you can’t use windows anymore XD
I had to troubleshoot some windows problems for family a bit back, and it was the worst x3
I’m about at that point. I had to set up a Windows VM last year to do some testing. It was more of a struggle to install than I expected.
I stopped using it regularly several years ago, then I come back to help someone install it and it took me more time than I want to admit to figure out how to make a local account that wasn’t attached to a Microsoft cloud account.
To be fair they make this harder almost by the day.
By design. Soon ms won’t allow you to even have the OS installed, it will only be internet accessible (no internet=no pc usage) so they can steal more data for free.
Joke’s on me, I still have to use windows at work!
Nah, even a kid can handle Windows. But after becoming a Linux user, I don’t even want to look at Windows, that’s for sure.
A young enough kid can handle just about anything put in front of them at the same rate. When you are learning from zero there isn’t a ton of difference.
I mean early 2000s? Oh windows easier 100%. But today? Both are easy im different ways and to a child just starting out on computer it won’t matter
That’s why sausages are better than Linux: you can start using them on a professional level right from the start. And as a bonus sausages don’t use Nvidia!
…and this was before April…
This timeline is so fucked 😂😂😂
But I use Linux all the time and am still horrible at it!
Fr, GitHub may as well be written in wingdings
Thank Linus for nerds that write proper readmes
Meanwhile, when, as a little more than a basic user, I look at my system, feeling as if I’m dealing with a dumpster fire just to have that nagging recurrent insight: “I actually have a brain and can learn!”
You can actually go through the motions for years and learn nothing if the software allows for it.
That was me for a while, then I decided I was done learning computer. 💩
Hopefully we can make progress on the “getting people started” front instead of the “I hate UI and am superior to others” circlejerk
Me when I realize the more I use Termux, the better I get at using Debian
