Operating Systems

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All things operating system related, from Windows to Mac to Linux distros and the more obscure.

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best resources and tips for a newbie to linux? (beehaw.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I didn't realize this community existed and posted my other thread about linux distros in another community, so I'll try rectifying that here.

I'm trying to learn as much about linux as a desktop system as I can before I dive in to installing a distro on my computer. I do have a tiny bit of familiarity with the terminal from having servers running Debian, but those I get a lot of help with. the distro I've chosen is Bazzite, which is based(?) on Fedora if I recall right. I liked the stuff it comes with (I love video games) built in and I like the idea of the atomic desktop setup.

so, what are your tips and tricks for a new linux user? what about outside resources? I've been doing as much digging for articles and videos as I can, but I thought asking the community might be a good idea too. I'm trying to compile these resources for myself and my partner, so that we have stuff to learn from and reference.

as a final question, what got you into using linux over windows or mac?

thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Don't follow tutorials, understand them. I'm so tired of seeing useless uses of cat because some asshole writing a tutorial 20 years ago decided to illustrate how pipes work with a good ol cat file | grep string as if grep didn't take a file name as an argument.

The more time I spend being mad about this the more I notice people using horrible practices in tutorials because they're too lazy to setup a legit use case.

A new user sees this and thinks this is how grep works.

Loops are another common one. People going around not knowing you can pass a glob to a shell for loop. Because the tutorial they read was lazily written and they didn't bother to understand the bits of what they were being shown, only how to reproduce/mangle the command until they manage to get close enough to what they want out of it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I'm absolutely going to do my best to understand and not copy/paste without doing that. I don't like doing things to my computer that I don't know what is happening, so that makes sense to me! I already ran into that issue plenty of times with my servers, so I'm trying to go all in now.

thank you!

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