Wait, there's books and classes on linux?

Around 2006 I watched a video on YouTube of a guy showing off Pendrive Linux booting from a USB drive and it blew my mind that you could run an entire OS from a lowly USB drive. I then made my own and used it to play games on the computers at my middle school and have been unfortunately addicted to Linux ever since. Later on in my 20s I took a Linux class in college and my professor was really impressed I already knew so much about Linux. 8 years of "brute forcing it" taught me quite a bit. Now I'm a jaded network administrator and have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

Books? Surely you mean man pages.

For real. Some guy I knew introduced me to SuSE back when I was in highschool. It was great and all, but it made things easy by hiding details behind snappy GUIs. While I was in college, I started to realize I wasn't learning anything about Linux. So I took a deep breath and installed Gentoo. Switched to Arch for a while, but I'm back to Gentoo now. I wanted to learn more about how Linux really worked and holy shit did I get my wish.

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

I recently had to restore a backup after a btrfs partition failed and became permanently read-only, and just for fun I tried to restore the backup of the broken partition to working order and read through tons of forums and spoke on the #btrfs libera chat with the experts and at the end of it this is my advice:

Do not use btrfs, use ext4 instead. btrfs failures are unrecoverable and they don't care.

Rawdogging gang represent!

I started in the late 90's with a Mandrake CD from a magazine. No internet meant nothing more than "this is interesting but I can't do anything with yet".

Then in school we were given a PC, an internet connection and we burned a Debian 3 CD. I became expert at reinstalling it because at the time it was the "simplest" way to unfuck what I fucked up.

Then I just winged it at work and learned a lot.

Then I just moved every system at home to Linux. Never looked back.

Sometimes I feel I still know nothing. But then, when asked to do any administrative task on Winslop/macOS that I know can do in a few seconds on Linux, I feel so hapless and inefficient that I feel it must amount to something.

LOL Rawdogging Linux is INSANE; I did it through a bit of a cycle of reading, using my system, learning more. I still broke my systems but the fun part: I had a second HDD so all of my important bits were safe typically. I distro-hopped for years, mostly moving between openSUSE (older version and Tumbleweed), Ubuntu (started when it was 16.04), Fedora, Mint, Debian, Bazzite, Aurora, tried Artix briefly (the community is lacking). Finally settled on Garuda Linux, btw! Found something that suits my needs and I have enough knowledge that I haven't broken my system once...Heh, good times!

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

I had a somewhat similar introduction. My Windows XP ran into a blue screen on boot and I couldn’t afford tech support or a Windows CD to reinstall. This was well before I knew how to pirate software.

So one of the ladies in tech support at my high school recommended I try Ubuntu. I think it was version 8 at the time and had a really charming boot sound.

I was instantly hooked when I came across the GTK/Emerald theming options because I was big into RocketDock at the time but again couldn’t afford to buy it. When I found out you could customize everything all the way to the boot menu without hacking it, I spent the next six months learning the whole system to build it into a fully custom personal theme from boot to desktop.

It took until Proton hit its stride before I could finally daily it but I almost always had it available in the side on at least one or two of my computers.

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

Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.

(* as long as you're willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you've fucked up.)

bit of a ridiculous sentiment when there's so many guides for stuff online that I wouldn't know which category to put myself in. I definitely didn't take classes nor read books on it, yet I absolutely took a guided approach.

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

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

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

I learned a lot of stuff by raw dogging it and really envy people who took courses or had tutors or mentors (for any hobby/skill)

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.

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...

Damn, that's hard mode. I just used web search to figure things out. IDK whether that's still a viable method, though.

Pink guy should be "Me who asks Claude to fix the things I broke asking ChatGPT what to do."

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

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

i learned by getting yelled at on irc

I learned that shit in the late 2000's trying to get games to run on Ubuntu with wine. No real idea just lots of googling, trial & error, plus too much ADD to ever properly read a manpage 😅

Superuser and Askubuntu were revelations when they came around.

I cried tears of joy when Lord Gaben bestowed upon us a native Steam Linux client.

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.

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.

::: spoiler spoiler was thinking BSD nowadays because I don't exactly trust Torvalds with LLMs and shit, apart from bloat :::

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

I feel like most of us who got into linux in that era got to truly know it that way - tinkering with it, breaking things and figuring them out by ourselves. In my particular case we didn't had internet at home until late 2008 so even "simple" things like updating stuff was a real pain in the ass, though the ubuntu cds were salvation.

reading books? meh. reading docs? fun

I rawdogged it then took classes and learned like 1% more than I knew before from raw-dogging

I've recently moved completely away from Windows on my personal devices. Running Bazzite on desktop PC (for games) and Mint on laptop (for performance). So far it hasn't been that different from Win10 in terms of daily use, but I've noticed fixing broken stuff is actually easier as the system finally treats me as the real owner of my PC. And Mint is treating my old laptop way better than either Win7 or 10.

I rawdogged it. I learned almost everything [I might need] about it in the process.

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.

DSL! Such a classic.

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.

It should be the other way around.

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

Mandrake and Winmodems.

I started with Linux on a 2.0 kernel, in 1995 or 96. I only had one computer and there were no smartphones. There was no option besides rawdogging Linux. You pampered youngsters don't know how good you have it!

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.

Similar timing, a friend introduced me to Ubuntu around 2005 or 2006 and dualbooted for a while and always had a live USB with me. Tried many distros, I think openSuse was my favorite for a while and then switched to OSX86 until I got a laptop at my job (with windows) and I got a tablet so I stopped having a personal computer until about 5 years ago when I got a very cheap laptop that turned to crap when it "upgraded" to Windows 11 and that's when I discovered linux

My biggest issue with self learning is that I used chmod 777 to try to fix everything since most of the time it "worked"

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

I love this meme 🤣. I kinda did both. So good.

Damn, we’ve been raw dogging it for a couple years now. No dual booting though. On cachy now

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager

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

I'm self-taught.

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

I have a linux sysop manual from 1999 somewhere. Probably because I was that friend you were always trying to lure away from Windows with Red Hat dual boots and “look Starcraft plays great on Wine!”.

This is satire right? I'm a little confused.

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

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.