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
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.
❌ Fixing (your) computers for free
✅ Fixing (other) computers for money
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.
That’s neat. When I was in college I would carry a live USB thumb drive and would sometimes play games off of it, too, in the computer room of the business building. Also, I use Mint, too, since it works well for me.
Back in the day tomsrtbt was similarly inspiring. It could boot from a single 3½" floppy. Always kept one around as a rescue disk.
I rawdogged it then took classes and learned like 1% more than I knew before from raw-dogging
You don’t need to read books, most stuff can be found in the Arch Wiki
Man pages are also something underrated and tldr is great if you need a quick look at a few basic parameters of a program.
Plot twist: there’s books and classes on just about everything
You mean I can read books and take classes on eating ass!?
I mean, probably. But doing it seems more fun
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
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.
Thank you Microsoft for forcing me to learn how to use and maintain Linux.
Ah yes the college of “Fuck it, we ball”.
You shouldn’t have to take a class for an operating system…
You can use it without learning additional skills, but to truly know what’s going on with any operating system that requires higher knowledge. I’m including windows, mac, android, linux, etc in this. If we could fully understand technology by touching it tech support wouldn’t need to exist. Nor would the insane number of overpriced certifications.
…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.
Someone told me to RTFM. I later realized that was good advice. (I learned by reading documentation)
Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.
(* as long as you’re willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you’ve fucked up.)
It warms my heart that after your journey you realized there is still so much more to learn.
Many would leave it there and call themselves an expert
The beef i have with printed tech literature is tat it ages out pretty quickly.
I prefer man pages and wikis.I rawdogged it. I learned almost everything [I might need] about it in the process.
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.
