• Maiq@lemy.lol
        8·
        12 days ago

        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.

  • zxqwas@lemmy.world
    56·
    13 days ago

    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.

    • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
      91·
      13 days ago

      Me too. My final reason to not go back to windows was that I realized I didn’t actually really care for the games I played with restrictive anti cheat and was only playing them because they were popular.

      Now I just play games that I consciously acknowledge I’m enjoying playing, and that has been great for mental health as well.

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
      3·
      13 days ago

      I’ve been playing with Linux for almost 20 years and only wiped my windows partition maybe 2 years ago. I figured I can run a windows VM on my Proxmox rig, but I haven’t had the need to yet (probably helps that I’m not big into gaming).

  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    19·
    13 days ago

    We are not all devs/sysadmins. For a long time thought I didn’t really know what I was doing, until one day someone had an issue running an old game and I looked at the error and could tell them how to fix it by editing the launch script.

    • send_me_your_ink@lemmynsfw.com
      11·
      13 days ago

      Congratulations. Your a system admin. For real.

      I’ve interviewed candidates for system admin jobs who had less exposure to managing Linux then this story.

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
      5·
      13 days ago

      Last Sunday I groggily ran an update on my EOS install, which promptly borked Plasma. Rolled back via timeshift which then destroyed my bootloader. Fired up a live USB, reinstalled the bootloader, peace was restored to the galaxy.

      I’ll be honest, the existential dread of losing a sunday to reinstalling my system was at the forefront of my mind most of the morning, but the sweet relief of booting into my system after all was said and done was fantastic.

      • highball@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        12 days ago

        Been using Linux for several decades now. I’ve always been able to throw in a floppy or a CD, or now a thumbdrive and just boot up and easily fix what’s wrong. Plus it’s rare to even have to do that. The times I’ve used Windows, when things go wrong, if it’s not a simple fix, best you can do is format and reinstall. I have friends who are so numb to that. But they figure, they might as well since they’ll just have have to format Windows and reinstall anyways because, Windows gets slower over time. I have one friend who had it on his calendar to just monthly reinstall Windows. I’ve never once thought, wow Linux is getting slow, let me format and reinstall. I mean, how can that even be an acceptable solution to anybody. Sure, if things just went sideways so badly and everything is corrupted, but that would be one hell of an extreme exception.

  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
    121·
    12 days ago

    I have a coworker who went from windows only to “i want to try self host a bunch of stuff”

    Ran into lots of learning curves and problems

    Conclusion? “Linux sucks! Too difficult!”

    • highball@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      12 days ago

      Everything I selfhost was easily setup with a simple compose file and various env files for each resource. What the heck was he trying to setup? I haven’t used Windows in a long time, but I doubt they have anything as easy as a declarative file like compose.

  • Lad@reddthat.com
    11·
    13 days ago

    I just use Linux mint because it looks nice and is user friendly and I’m mostly Linux illiterate. But I’m learning between that and SteamOS on my steam deck.

    No shame in it.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
      3·
      13 days ago

      The OG route. I started in 1995/96 and it was all groping around in the dark and hoping to find a helpful book at Borders.

  • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    81·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      31·
      12 days ago

      I feel like with the Arch distributions like EndeavourOS and CachyOS it’s a lot easier nowadays.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
      21·
      12 days ago

      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.

  • utopiah@lemmy.world
    6·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
      2·
      12 days ago

      This is great advice. Heed this advice, people.

      Know what? I’ll add to it. In Windows a power user will often end up screwing around in the registry or system files or whatever to crowbar it into doing what they want it to do…

      But if you’re opening a root shell or file-explorer screwing around outside your /home folder, digging around in / ? On your daily use machine?

      STOP. ☠️

      • FACT: People Systems have died and data has been irrecoverably lost by going into this cave.
      • There’s probably a much less dangerous way to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do!!
      • You shouldn’t be poking around things and exploring a working system as ROOT! This is by design!

      GO. NO. FURTHER!

      These sorts of shenanigans are why you play around in virtual machines. :)

      –Sincerely: Someone who manually deleted his writable in-use BTRFS snapshot when trying to free up space, thinking it was an orphan file that the system tools didn’t detect, rendering his system unbootable and unrecoverable, forcing a complete reinstall. (I found this is analogous to the infamously dangerous “rm -rf /” , or thinking you’re deleting an old Windows restore point but somehow wiping C:\ )

      If you don’t know what “3-2-1 backup” means. Now’s the time to look that up!