I’ve also got the Linux Basics for Hackers book but it’s at home while I’m on vacation.
I’m just really happy rn yall :) this install took some work, SecureBoot kept getting in the way and I’m not the most savvy person so there was a lot of Googling and trial and error in the way of getting here.
Be mindful that Linux changes faster than a lot of books. I would stick to online documentation.
Books will teach the essentials: my core UNIX knowledge comes from an SVR4 book I read in the late 2000s (a decade or more after it was relevant) and it’s still applicable today
Those books were published in 2019 and 2021. They’ll still be mostly accurate a decade from now. Open-source developers usually try not to introduce breaking changes to mature software unless absolutely necessary.
Welcome in from the cold. We have blankets and coco.
I’m about to repartition and reinstall everything. I’m very fucking tempted to drop this dual boot nonsense now that I have a good idea of what little I’d be losing.
I screwed up my dual boot a year ago and it was happiest mistake of my life. Forced me to learn linux, and now I feel like I live in the matrix with all my bright green terminals on i3.
I remember when I used green on black lol. Good times at uni. Nowadays I even use light mode in the daytime… I get too sleepy with dark mode in the daytime lol. Guess I’m getting old.
Welcome! Don’t listen to anyone trying to shame you for your distro choice. The most important is that you didn’t choose windows.
Thanks! I plan to experiment with others, but I wanted a nice smooth transition for my wife and I both, so Mint seemed like a great starting point.
I’ve been daily driving mint for over a year now, gotta say, never been tempted by anything else. It really is solid and functional and easy to work with. The only issue I’ve ever had with the system was programs closing randomly, and turns out I was just running out of ram. Fixed that by adding more swap (using part of the hard drive as back up ram).
Having come from windows, it’s really nice to not have to search through 5 different settings menus, not to mention not having changes I made reverted at every update.
I used Mint for almost its entire existence so far, but recently I’ve started main driving immutables, and gotta say the experience is even more user friendly. That’s my current experimentation stage but, so far, it doesn’t feel experimental at all, it just works out the box, no issues.
Mint is rad. I currently use barebones Debian testing with a bunch of customized stuff, but I always keep a bootable Mint flash drive on my keychain. It’s a very solid choice
No, no! Listen to the shamers! Change your distro eight times over the first month as you listen to them whine, and eventually return to the first one you chose, full of wisdom of why those other distros suck so you can tell the noobs who choose one of them first instead of your glorious choice!
You picked some really good books to get started with! Lot of online help these days!
You’ll probably be making lots of changes to your computer over the next couple of weeks, so it’s a good idea to use TimeShift to make system snapshots. (It works like System Restore in Windows). It can even rescue an unbootable system. Just boot from your Linux Live CD / flash drive and you can run TimeShift from that.
Whoah… wish I knew about this when I was setting up my raspberry pi. Got a brand new computer on the way (well half of it is here already) so this might come in handy… thanks!
Welcome to the club! Mint is an excellent choice, especially from a beginner’s perspective. Don’t let that stop you from trying other things though if you get the temptation. Fedora and Arch are the two other ‘families’ I can think of to play with, though I’ve stuck with things in the Debian side of things myself.
Quick tip: forgot how to use a command? Use
man commandnameto see a short manual page for that command.Forgot sudo on your command?
!!refers to the previously typed command, so you can simply typesudo !!to fix it.tldr or teeldeer is the short manual. fwiw
wtfgives the summary, and works for acronyms too.
If you don’t know how to use man, just type in
man man.man man man gives the secrets to the universe
Welcome! I have been using Mint many years now its a gold standard distro you made a solid choice.
