I’ve come to L1 for a number of Linux-related issues and no matter how noobish (is that even a word?) my questions are, I always get multiple replies and none of the usual, “Uh, ACTUALLY” comments I’ve seen in other Linux forums or the mocking comments about how my particular distro has training wheels and I should strive to use a “real” Linux distro. For that, I thank everyone here.
Being a DOS veteran that migrated to Windows, I couldn’t figure out why I was having so many issues, and then it hit me…it’s the directory structure! The whole idea that files/folders can be represented by links and things like ~/ LOL! I’ve even noticed it can make a difference if you include the trailing / on a folder or not. Anyway, the more I use it, the more I like it. My Plex server now automatically updates itself daily/monthly and backs up changes to my library each day via cron jobs. And OpenSSH is awesome. Not needing a monitor/keyboard/mouse makes everything look very professional in my entertainment center!
I guess you could say I “wrote a script.” It called RCLONE with the options I wanted and the source & destination. The other scripts I added for automating updates came verbatim from a webpage, but I could follow exactly what it was doing.
Hello there, (pun intended)
just had a laugh about “free” command with --help showing
-b, --bytes show output in bytes
–kilo show output in kilobytes
–mega show output in megabytes
–giga show output in gigabytes
–tera show output in terabytes
–peta show output in petabytes
-k, --kibi show output in kibibytes
-m, --mebi show output in mebibytes
-g, --gibi show output in gibibytes
–tebi show output in tebibytes
–pebi show output in pebibytes
-h, --human show human-readable output
as if other ones were not readable by humans, so what are we then? non-humans? xD
Nice! Gotta pick up the right syntax for the incantation somewhere, and when copying from sites, you can break the commands down to work out what each bit is, so in future you can do it without copying.
I’ve heard of people who find a command, and book mark the site with the name of the Windows command it replicates.
Which works, but has no gain, and they will always be susceptible to bad actors throwing a sneaky rm -rf in there.
Also it seems new visitors to Linux need moderate-to-good google/ddg skills.
Stuff breaks; knowing which of the symptoms to pop in the box, makes the difference to finding useful help.
At the end of the day, one can always fresh install, so better to play around and break things.
I would mostly suggest keeping /hone on a separate disk or partition if only one drive.
Then you can change out your distro.
You can also migrate /home later.
Yes, this. I purposely did not cut & paste from the forum post and manually entered each line, giving myself time to understand what the person was doing.
Yes, but people don’t need a neck-bearded, basement-dweller looking down his nose at them from atop his high horse (literally, a tall rocking horse) when they make the decision to give Linux a shot and they pick the most user-friendly distro to help them. (Granted, most users probably don’t fit thast description, but that’s the image I get when I encounter Linux snobs) I can understand that there might be more efficient, more elegant distros that omit things by default unless specifically installed, but one must know their audience. You don’t put someone learning to ride a motorcycle for the first time on a Suzuki Hayabusa!
I really don’t want to be that guy, but the single best advice I can give to new users is learn how to RTFM. Want to learn more about ssh? type man ssh. Want to learn more about awk, man awk. Want to learn more about man? Type man man. man hier will also give you a good description of the filesystem hierarchy.
you should also type ‘man ass’ and see what you get
User friendly distros are kind of a weird topic. Some people believe they set new users up for failure, others believe they are the best way to go. Either way, distros often matter much less than people think they do. It’s just a collection of software and in some cases an ideological way of doing things.
The neckbeards do what they do because of the freedom Linux gives you. Libre is a hell of a drug.
I can understand that there might be more efficient, more elegant distros that omit things by default unless specifically installed, but one must know their audience.
To echo what Adubs said, they are the same. The difference is mostly an illusion. Some distros behave more in a “sync” manner, where as others do more procedural updates. Some wait for stable package releases, others have the latest upstream. Other than those (subtle) differences, the use of distro X and distro Y is negligible.
You’ll find better documentation and support (via community) with something like Ubuntu and CentOS over something like Void or Solus. I don’t mean any disrespect toward those last two projects, it’s just simply because more people are using the first two.
and then theres me, reading the archwiki while using mint to understand how to properly configure some piece of software for my hardware because the process is pretty much identical on all distros.
I like mint because its already the way I like to set up my DE and it comes with flatpak instead of snap. Otherwise I’d probably use fedora workstation and call it a day.
I also gave my mother mint to use on an old core2duo laptop I refurbished. Havent heard any complaints.
