this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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    Wait, there's books and classes on linux? (lemmy.world)
    submitted 20 hours ago by LeftReddit2@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
    103 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     

    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

    (page 2) 50 comments
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    [–] swooper@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

    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.

    [–] rtxn@lemmy.world 11 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

    Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.

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

    [–] sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

    Well that is like telling a developer who knew nothing about containers, kubernetes or the kernel cgroups are the best way to learn container tech.

    I'm just comparing in terms of complexity. Not functionality. And yes they have fundamental concepts that helps. But that is not needed for everyone.

    In other words, vast majority of the users don't need to know the complexities of these things. A user friendly platform like Docker is all they need. We all know it is because of how good the developer tooling of Docker, was the major reason for the wide spread usage of containers.

    Those who have interest, and like to explore more may take on kubernetes after learning Docker and fundamentals of containerisation.

    [–] Laser@feddit.org 2 points 14 hours ago

    I think so too actually if you're looking to learn the basics.

    Arch has very little actual "distribution" in its system (mostly pacman and mkinitcpio) and the former is a glorified tar with a database, and while it can run scripts, you're expected to configure and set up everyone yourself using the upstream tools, and these usually come vanilla

    I daily drove it for 15 years before I switched so it's not like Arch is insured for that. But if you want to learn the basics of modern Linux it's a good choice

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    [–] hansolo@lemmy.today 5 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

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

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    [–] meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

    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 πŸ˜…

    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.

    [–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 9 points 15 hours ago

    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.

    [–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

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

    [–] schwifty_squanch@lemmy.ml 27 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

    Books? Surely you mean man pages.

    [–] Allero@lemmy.today 3 points 16 hours ago

    One can absolutely not comprehend man pages without already having the experience working with various things

    [–] ladicius@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

    Come on, nobody reads man pages. That's pathetic.

    [–] LeftReddit2@lemmy.world 28 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

    [–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 13 hours ago

    man, apropos, info...

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    [–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 25 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

    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.

    [–] LeftReddit2@lemmy.world 14 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

    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?

    [–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

    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: .exe or .bin files

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    [–] SuperUserDO@sh.itjust.works 9 points 16 hours ago

    No need to take a class. Find a project you want to do and a engineer/system admin who's willing to mentor.

    [–] ajikeshi@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

    you could always go for LPIC, the books/courses tend to be quite cheap and the exams usually are cheap as well

    LPIC will provide you with a stable foundation that you can venture out from on your own

    [–] lfox02@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 hours ago

    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.

    [–] underscores@lemmy.zip 6 points 15 hours ago

    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)

    [–] LostWanderer@fedia.io 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

    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!

    [–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

    I did it this way too, with a small debian home server/media center about 15 years back (i had another debian set up on my main rig about 20 years back, but since i am a gamer, i did not do much more than dabble a bit in it). After Proton became a thing and i was unwilling to switch to Win11, i installed Nobara. Since then i have learned a lot, and i even got myself some literature to learn about computers for the first time in my life (got a bundle of O'Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux and surrounding things for a good price)

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    [–] otacon239@lemmy.world 12 points 18 hours ago

    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.

    [–] raven55six@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

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

    [–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 15 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

    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.

    [–] Peffse@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

    I ran a software RAID5 via LVM2 and when a failure occurs it becomes some voodoo magic that not even the maintainers understand.

    Lost 6TB of archives.

    [–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

    Guess you learned, but the rules of backup are 3-2-1 with at least one offline (I count offline HDD as a different media type for 2, tape one day, maybe, seems painful), it's not a real backup until you've restored from it and, RAID is not a backup.

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    [–] dadarobot@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

    i learned by getting yelled at on irc

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    [–] nil@piefed.ca 3 points 14 hours ago

    reading books? meh. reading docs? fun

    [–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

    What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

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

    [–] LeftReddit2@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

    Can you teach a package manager how to love?

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    [–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 points 14 hours ago

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

    [–] GarboDog@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

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

    [–] lemmysmash@piefed.social 3 points 16 hours ago

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

    [–] red_bull_of_juarez@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 16 hours ago

    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!

    [–] criticon@lemmy.ca 2 points 15 hours ago

    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"

    [–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 points 17 hours ago

    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.

    [–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 5 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

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

    [–] mmmm@sopuli.xyz 3 points 19 hours ago

    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.

    [–] the_q@piefed.social 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

    Mandrake and Winmodems.

    [–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago

    Ah. The memories and trauma of Winmodems and Linux!

    [–] daggermoon@piefed.world 1 points 16 hours ago

    I'm self-taught.

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