Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there’s more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.
In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.
And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.
So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there’s more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON’T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!
shoutouts to tux
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.
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.
When I was younger, I actually liked it when my computer broke because I thought fixing it was giving me knowledge. I guess it did to some extent, but I’d rather my stuff just work now that I’m older.
Books? Surely you mean man pages.
Thank you Microsoft for forcing me to learn how to use and maintain Linux.
Im just waiting till shit breaks and then panicking like a normal person
The fact that Linux is so easily reinstalled has really been a hinder in my journey towards learning to actually fix the problems that would prompt a reinstall.
Over decades I have come to love the dark crypt of arcane spells that is GRUB rescue env.
yeah EFI booting solved a lot of boot problems and made them fixable in a way they never were with legacy BIOS
Plot twist: there’s books and classes on just about everything
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.
Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.
(* as long as you’re willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you’ve fucked up.)
I love this meme 🤣. I kinda did both. So good.
I rawdogged it. I learned almost everything [I might need] about it in the process.
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.
Ain’t no way I will ever try Gentoo. I don’t even know what “compiling from source” means or what the difference between that an “binaries” are.
You know, it is shocking I work IT when I barely understand tech at all. Though to be fair I am a help desk guy. I have Google IT Support, ITIL 4 Foundation, CCNA, and Security+ so I know some stuff. Kind of. A bit.
I should just take that Linux+ class shouldn’t I?
I don’t even know what “compiling from source” means or what the difference between that an “binaries” are.
To make it simple:
“Source code” is readable human code which is a set of instructions you give to the computer, think of it like a tutorial the computer reads to do stuff
“compiling from source” is that act of making human readable code in to computer readable code, computers can only understand machine code, luckly compiling is automatic these days
“Binaries” are packages which contain all the compiled code ex:
.exeor.binfiles
You shouldn’t have to take a class for an operating system…
…So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?
I’ve had windows classes in school, I’ve later learned how to configure Windows and Linux servers. Windows starts simple and isn’t easy to customize away from the default configuration. Linux starts difficult but doesn’t grow as quick in complexity. Both shouldn’t be configured that far by most users though and the basic usage of both has similar complexity.
Why do you think an operating system shouldn’t have classes? From what I’m hearing around the workplace(though thats biased) more people should have basic computer knowledge and they even get training time allocated for in-house training courses.
Basic computer knowledge is the answer here. Concepts in OS’es and software are reused over and over and are common to most vendors/platforms. Partitions/Partitioning… etc. All basic knowledge. The fine details don’t make sense without it.
