Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.
Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.
And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.
I agree with you for a hobby OS. Like if somebody wants to learn and knows generally how to back up what they don’t want to lose, Arch is invaluable! I’m currently enjoying EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop for how newb-friendly the community is.
If someone just wants a working machine that allows them to dabble if they’re feeling it, Mint is good for that. Not everyone’s gotta be a sysadmin right?
I personally feel like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great balance though.
It works, yet it rolls, and you can still mess around if you want. Although it’s sometimes frustrating when it does things differently than Arch or Ubuntu and the advice is scant… But I guess that’s it’s own learning experience!
I occasionally make a project out of learning things like compiling software, but it doesn’t demand too much maintenance when I just need to get stuff done.
Thank God they didn’t try to install open BSD
I’ve been playing with Bazzite
Thata how i learnt. Arch + i3. Broke it a couple times, but learnt alot
Same here! College friends spent hours late night helping me install and configure Arch + i3 on an old MacBook, going crazy trying to get wifi working. Great memories
Same. Time Shift was a god send in those first few months. But that was the only way I was going to learn…
I switched from Windows to Mint this week and I’m also that derpy dragon
Heh. I just went from a Chromebook to mint.
Honestly baffled by the basics. Currently youtubing how to mount a NFS share from (on?) my NAS.
Not 100% sure if there’s an easy-mode for this one but just a friendly reminder to copy fstab to
fstab.oldorfstab.backupso you can revert to it if something doesn’t go right. :)
Are you me?! Also just migrated to Mint, and I’m really impressed. Good level of polish, and stuff just works out of the box.
Currently still have it on dual boot, I’ll give it a week or two and I don’t need Windows in that time I’ll move it to my main M2 SSD and ditch M$
I tried it from a USB drive first and when I saw how easy it is I just took the leap and fully switched.
My biggest worry was gaming but even there was no problem at all
Same story! The improvements in the gaming sphere really need to be experienced to be believed. But okay, Steam works great, we know that.
What about stuff that requires EA’s launcher through Steam? Works.
EA exclusive stuff? Heroic Launcher. Works.
GoG? Heroic Launcher.
Ahh, but old disc games that Windows decided to just stop caring about anymore? Bottles. (Not 100% guarantee, but I’ve been IMPRESSED at how easy it was to get something like Sims 1 to play.)
Hotel? Trivago.Now I just hope the Monado project can make some leaps so we can get WMR devices working on Linux. VR is super neat and I don’t wanna leave it behind completely. :( (Still grudging against M$ so hard for that.)
I was you six months ago.
Formated the W10 drive before christmas as I never spun it up anymore. Have fun in Linux!
So… actually (put on fedora hat) it’s a GREAT way to learn!
What I do NOT recommend though is distro hopping with your data and your daily life setup. Namely the safest to learn is main system is stable, easy to setup and fix, you’re comfortable with even if you are not “proud” to claim it on Lemmy BUT the weird stuff you do on the side, it’s on a dedicate harddrive (ideally not even partition, just so that you can even mess that up) and you go LinuxFromScratch of whatever rock your boat knowing your data is safe and if you fuck up you can still go on with your day.
put on fedora hat
I see what you did there
I feel it sould be a Red Hat in this context
It’s actually how IT career ladder looks from right to left
Why hate on the sysadmin?
Hate? Where hate? I’m working as sysadmin
You put sysadmins below developers.
Keeping it working versus creating it in the first place.
Well duuuuh, how else will you admin a system without a dev developing the system to admin
Everyone is a bit lost at first… That’s the first step to becoming an expert.
Great that you’re trying to learn something new!
Welcome.
Thank you!
You need to end your sentences with “I use Arch btw”, read the Arch wiki for more info
I use Arch btw
That was close…
The first step to being really good at something is being willing to be really bad at something while you practice.
‘Suckin’ at somethin is the first step being sorta good at something’ - Jake the dog
I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.
Is nobara really more familiar territory than arch? I’d never heard of it before. Arch may not always hold your hand, but it’s extremely well documented.
Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.
I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.
I’m old (not much, though) but back in my day it happened the same thing with people like me. Only that instead Arch+Hyprland it was Compiz Fusion+Beryl because the cube and the flames was the tits.
Also I just happen to be a graphic designer so hopefully this post of yours helps into letting die that idea that Linux is only for devs and sysadmins.
Conpiz fusion!.. I’ve created so many problems for myself trying to run it on ATI at the time.
Totally worth it :D
I switched from Windows to Linux last year, after switching from Linux to Windows back in 2007 or so. I was happy to find that not only is the wobbly window effect still available, it’s available out-of-the-box on KDE without installing any other software. It has the cube effect and magic lamp effect when minimizing/unminimizing windows too.
It’s also interesting that AMD went from having the worst Linux graphics driver (fglrx) to the best one. I have some graphical issues with my work PC and laptop (with Nvidia GPUs) that I don’t have with my personal laptop (with AMD GPU).
It’s because AMD went open source with it
Everyone’s welcome to the party pal
I started messing with Linux, then became a developer. Whatever draws your interest!
So the next step is to take up farming?
You say that, but try getting help on StackExchange when you clearly don’t know what you’re doing.
Stackx might not be the best place for Linux help. Can be a pretty unforgiving place.
Lemmy is a lot more friendly and people will try to help you out, even if you don’t know what your doing.
After over a decade of using it exclusively at home and partially at work I still googled how to add users to a group last week.
Well yeah. You barely use groups on a personal machine - maybe once and done for audio and VMs, depending on what distro you use - and at work you’d automate that shit, probably have it centralised.
I try to remember commands backwards by how they look(<command> <flags> <arguments>), if they are short, have capital letters and so on… Is that weird? If I give up I open the history file or my good ol’ cheat sheet.
(Tip: Most shells allow you to press Ctrl+R to interactively search through history, meaning you won’t have to open a separate file.)
Thank you, I already have it configured with fzf aswell, and another to search folders to jump to them.
You need https://starship.rs/
I did use it but the only real benefit for me as a hobbyist was the git status indicator on the prompt and the easy to configure prompt. The rest of the indicators did not help me since I’m not a developer. Now I just have my custom prompt with colors, and custom git info.
But it autocompletes pretty well, isn’t it? 🤔or was it fish doing that
Fish does history autocomplete, not Starship — you still have autocomplete using unconfigured Fish, and you don’t get autocompletion by enabling Starship for other shells.
I quite sure fish has it, but I use zsh without autocompletions, I just press tab until I find what I need. And the fzf history shortcuts for the rest.
Was it “groupadd” or “addgroup”…? I can never remember xD
usermod -aG group usermnemonic: user mod append groupgroupdel,groupadd
userdel,adduser
😆I ask AI for that
