Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
sudo in Windows.Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
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.
No, no! Listen to the shamers! Change your distro eight times over the first month as you listen to them whine, and eventually return to the first one you chose, full of wisdom of why those other distros suck so you can tell the noobs who choose one of them first instead of your glorious choice!
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
Just as long as it's not Red Star, that's even worse than windows.
If you have something to hide from The Glorious and Omnipotent Kim Jong Un, our beloved leader, you do not deserve to be a human. All hail our Dear Leader.
M’comrade…
I agree that’s why I don’t listen to all the hater’s who say my distro Choice of Android Tv is bad.
Quick tip: forgot how to use a command? Use man commandname to see a short manual page for that command.
Forgot sudo on your command? !! refers to the previously typed command, so you can simply type sudo !! to fix it.
oh wow, thank you for
sudo !!
this is amazing :D
Schotts provides a free 'internet edition' .pdf of TLCL, last updated 11/1/2024:
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 in from the cold. We have blankets and coco.
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.
Welcome! I have been using Mint many years now its a gold standard distro you made a solid choice.
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.
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
Hell yeah!! Welcome, fellow penguin. 🐧
Hey congrats, @[email protected]! By getting through that hurdle you most certainly are that savvy of a person. Enjoy the after success glow and welcome to the hacker universe.
Trial and error is 90% of life! Thats how you get shit done!
The Linux Command Line book opened up a lot to me. How Linux Works is very good, but the command line is so essential, and that book gives you some great starting knowledge like aliases and shell scripting.
Especially aliases. Take note of aliases, when you start using aliases it can change your world once you realize how much you can accomplish with what essentially are one line programs you wrote for you own personal needs.
Welcome beyond the pale, friend. You've made it to the other side. Only freedom awaits, should you have the determination to work for it.
I'm about to repartition and reinstall everything. I'm very fucking tempted to drop this dual boot nonsense now that I have a good idea of what little I'd be losing.
I screwed up my dual boot a year ago and it was happiest mistake of my life. Forced me to learn linux, and now I feel like I live in the matrix with all my bright green terminals on i3.
You don't need to reinstall. You could keep the old partition and format it and add it as a new volume while keeping the current installation.
If the windows volume is to the right of the Linux volume, you could also boot a live-usb and drop the windows partition and then extend the Linux partition then extend the Linux filesystem to cover all disk space. If it is to the left, you can do the same but you'd need to move the partition and reinstall the bootloader as well.
A backup would be mandatory If you don't really know what you would be doing with the above, however. But if you do, it's a lot easier and faster than to rebuild everything from scratch.
You picked some really good books to get started with! Lot of online help these days!
Welcome to the club! Mint is an excellent choice, especially from a beginner's perspective. Don't let that stop you from trying other things though if you get the temptation. Fedora and Arch are the two other 'families' I can think of to play with, though I've stuck with things in the Debian side of things myself.
Congratulations! It's really fun to learn something new. Don't let anyone distro shame you.
(Unless it's into installing Gentoo)
If you want to mess with the command line, I recommend tldr. Anyone could do xkcd's tar challenge if they can run tldr tar first! (pretty sure it's in mint's apt repos)
tar --help
Honestly, I consider myself moderately tech savvy. But I also had issues with SecureBoot when installing Linux. It really doesn't help when every single BIOS has different settings and they all want to make everything as poorly worded and unintuitive as humanly possible.
"Oh, you want an on/off toggle for SecureBoot? Sorry, no. Let's just fuck with you until you either brick your motherboard or somehow manage to install Linux."
My congratulations! You've managed to get past the most difficult hurdle.
To be fair, writing technical documentation for this shit is possibly the most unpleasant job in the world. After 5 minutes I desperately want to fuck off and get high.
That Linux command line book is really, really good. I love how it actually explains the commands and why to use them instead of just being a copy of each commands help document or something.
Congrats on ditching Windows!
Nice. I'm currently waiting on a "new" laptop, get off this old Core2 duo I'm typing on. Under $300 from a trusted ebay seller and I'll be in the right decade. Linux is awesome for using old hardware but my favorite part is the "free as in freedom" aspect.
If you do run into windows mandatory stuff it's not all that hard to run virtual machines now. I've been using VMWare player but on my incoming machine I'm going to give QEMU-KVM a shot. Move away from proprietary VMWare and onto free as in freedom software.
I am extremely excited for you. Welcome.
ugh r u rly usin [distro i dont use] just go back to micro$haft luser
What’s your initial impressions of the How Linux Works book?
Really clear and helpful! It's taken a lot of the intimidation away I think. I'd definitely recommend it to other noobs
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 /*)
Congratulations! Enjoy the journey! You'll look back in a few years and wonder how you ever managed with a Windows set up while you slip into the comfy-ness of your customized system.
Anyone have tips for someone wanting to do the same but have two hurdles?
Need multi-org account support for Teams due to multiple contracts across different orgs. At the moment I could run Windows in a VM for it but then notifications are rough. An option is running teams in multiple browser profiles / tabs but this is also not entirely ideal (6-7 profiles/tabs just for teams is rough). Any clever ideas welcome, or someone who may have experience with Matrix bridges to accommodate this somehow? Does that work for adhoc calls?
Speedy remote desktop. Parcel seems to be the closest in speed to RDP thus far, but it doesn't consistently transmit shortcut keys which makes development difficult. Any other suggestions, gladly welcome.
~~3. (no longer an issue) if you've seen my past comments, I used to seek an alternative to Fancy Zones, but my fix for this was to just get rid of my ultrawide and go back to multiple monitors. So this is no longer needed.~~
Welcome to the dark side! We got cookies
No starch press is my favorite. Welcome!
