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
Damn, we’ve been raw dogging it for a couple years now. No dual booting though. On cachy now
I recently had to restore a backup after a btrfs partition failed and became permanently read-only, and just for fun I tried to restore the backup and read through tons of forums and spoke on the #btrfs libera chat with the experts and at the end of it this is my advice:
Do not use btrfs, use ext4 instead. btrfs failures are unrecoverable and they don’t care.
I ran a software RAID5 via LVM2 and when a failure occurs it becomes some voodoo magic that not even the maintainers understand.
Lost 6TB of archives.
Guess you learned, but the rules of backup are 3-2-1 with at least one offline (I count offline HDD as a different media type for 2, tape one day, maybe, seems painful), it’s not a real backup until you’ve restored from it and, RAID is not a backup.
It was just my media rips. So to say it was “lost” is a bit dramatic I suppose. I just had to spend another two weeks re-ripping my DVD and Blu-ray collection to restore the lost archives. (Without the RAID this time lol)
Sounds like bs, maybe your specific problem was unrecoverable, in general they are.
I feel like most of us who got into linux in that era got to truly know it that way - tinkering with it, breaking things and figuring them out by ourselves. In my particular case we didn’t had internet at home until late 2008 so even “simple” things like updating stuff was a real pain in the ass, though the ubuntu cds were salvation.
Damn, that’s hard mode. I just used web search to figure things out. IDK whether that’s still a viable method, though.
For real. Some guy I knew introduced me to SuSE back when I was in highschool. It was great and all, but it made things easy by hiding details behind snappy GUIs. While I was in college, I started to realize I wasn’t learning anything about Linux. So I took a deep breath and installed Gentoo. Switched to Arch for a while, but I’m back to Gentoo now. I wanted to learn more about how Linux really worked and holy shit did I get my wish.
Ain’t no way I will ever try Gentoo. I don’t even know what “compiling from source” means or what the difference between that an “binaries” are.
You know, it is shocking I work IT when I barely understand tech at all. Though to be fair I am a help desk guy. I have Google IT Support, ITIL 4 Foundation, CCNA, and Security+ so I know some stuff. Kind of. A bit.
I should just take that Linux+ class shouldn’t I?
No need to take a class. Find a project you want to do and a engineer/system admin who’s willing to mentor.
you could always go for LPIC, the books/courses tend to be quite cheap and the exams usually are cheap as well
LPIC will provide you with a stable foundation that you can venture out from on your own
I don’t even know what “compiling from source” means or what the difference between that an “binaries” are.
To make it simple:
“Source code” is readable human code which is a set of instructions you give to the computer, think of it like a tutorial the computer reads to do stuff
“compiling from source” is that act of making human readable code in to computer readable code, computers can only understand machine code, luckly compiling is automatic these days
“Binaries” are packages which contain all the compiled code ex:
.exeor.debfiles.deb is more akin to .msi no? it’s a self-contained package file which contains the components to install an application, not a binary executable
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.
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.
❌ Fixing (your) computers for free
✅ Fixing (other) computers for money
Back in the day tomsrtbt was similarly inspiring. It could boot from a single 3½" floppy. Always kept one around as a rescue disk.
have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.
Using a Fedora spinoff (Nobara, because it had install mediums for PCs with NVidia GPUs and a lot of gaming specific things prepared out of the box) for a similar reason. I need an OS that is cutting edge enough to play the latest games, but not so cutting edge that it is prone to sudden disintegration after an update.
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.
Books? Surely you mean man pages.
Come on, nobody reads man pages. That’s pathetic.
man,apropos,info…Did you know? Typing
man toolin your web browser will bring you several websites with online manpages fortooland an useless AI overview on the top!
One can absolutely not comprehend man pages without already having the experience working with various things
I had a somewhat similar introduction. My Windows XP ran into a blue screen on boot and I couldn’t afford tech support or a Windows CD to reinstall. This was well before I knew how to pirate software.
So one of the ladies in tech support at my high school recommended I try Ubuntu. I think it was version 8 at the time and had a really charming boot sound.
I was instantly hooked when I came across the GTK/Emerald theming options because I was big into RocketDock at the time but again couldn’t afford to buy it. When I found out you could customize everything all the way to the boot menu without hacking it, I spent the next six months learning the whole system to build it into a fully custom personal theme from boot to desktop.
It took until Proton hit its stride before I could finally daily it but I almost always had it available in the side on at least one or two of my computers.
LOL Rawdogging Linux is INSANE; I did it through a bit of a cycle of reading, using my system, learning more. I still broke my systems but the fun part: I had a second HDD so all of my important bits were safe typically. I distro-hopped for years, mostly moving between openSUSE (older version and Tumbleweed), Ubuntu (started when it was 16.04), Fedora, Mint, Debian, Bazzite, Aurora, tried Artix briefly (the community is lacking). Finally settled on Garuda Linux, btw! Found something that suits my needs and I have enough knowledge that I haven’t broken my system once…Heh, good times!
I did it this way too, with a small debian home server/media center about 15 years back (i had another debian set up on my main rig about 20 years back, but since i am a gamer, i did not do much more than dabble a bit in it). After Proton became a thing and i was unwilling to switch to Win11, i installed Nobara. Since then i have learned a lot, and i even got myself some literature to learn about computers for the first time in my life (got a bundle of O’Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux and surrounding things for a good price)
I generally find O’Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux to be really useful! It’s a perfect way to learn the fundamentals, personally I haven’t gone too deep into computers yet. As that is going to happen when I learn more about C programming as it will be important then! Right now, I don’t have to go too deep into computers, as I am learning more about Python. So my Linux learning tends to relate on how you manipulate the system via terminal and fix weird ass problems that can happen sometimes!
Lol i can sing a song about weird ass problems on Linux. Currenty i have the issue that my PC randomly cant get SMART data from single hard drives - i have 5 HDDs (2 on the internal controller, the other 3 in an external casing using USB), 1 SSD (on the internal controller), 1 M.2 NVME drive and an extra PCIE controller with 2 M.2 Sata drives. So the issue is spread across at least 4 different controllers (internal, M.2, PCIE, External per USB) and even different power supplies - i don’t even know where to start. Smart data itself is fine for all drives. Started with the last big Fedora update.
Oh, Fedora updates have been known to break stuff occasionally and that honestly blows! I do hope you’ll be able to figure it all out in the end because that seems like this is going to cause you a terrible troubleshooter headache. As the issue seems so arbitrary yet it is a major issue, at least the SMART data itself is fine but…Damn that is a crazy issue to have to diagnose.
Haven’t had the time to really look at it yet, but the logfiles look like single drives become disconnected for fractions of a second while smart data is read - not long enough to cause them to become dismounted. So i can’t really rule out some strange hardware issue too… Preliminary web search isnt too forthcoming with possible reasons -.- If i find out what the reason is, i’ll update here.
EDIT: THINK I FIXED IT! It seems like the USB cable leading to the external drive case was damaged (i thought of that because i hit my foot on the table and it instantly reported a SMART error) - since i replaced the cable, i did not have any more occurrences. I do NOT have the slightest clue why this would affect reading SMART data from the other drives tho…
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.
i learned by getting yelled at on irc
Same. That was the tribunal through which you gained Linux maturity in the late 90s. RTFM was not a joke, it was a real mantra. On rare occasion, some guru would take pity and walk you through why your system wouldn’t boot anymore. Newsgroups and IRC were the only way to get help, and when no one would help you, you had to help yourself.
You mean, YELLED at?
I rawdogged it. I learned almost everything [I might need] about it in the process.
bit of a ridiculous sentiment when there’s so many guides for stuff online that I wouldn’t know which category to put myself in. I definitely didn’t take classes nor read books on it, yet I absolutely took a guided approach.
I started with Linux on a 2.0 kernel, in 1995 or 96. I only had one computer and there were no smartphones. There was no option besides rawdogging Linux. You pampered youngsters don’t know how good you have it!
This is satire right? I’m a little confused.
God forbid a man be sincere. What would I even be satirizing?
Oh! I thought you were implying difficult to learn linux. My bad.
I started using Linux a few years back. Feel the same here. It is like a never ending quest of figuring out things.
Such is life. Nah, I still use linux and now rather than dualbooting I have a dedicated DIRTY windows computer for all my online gaming and windows needs.
I only keep Windows at home because simulator peripherals can be more headache than I’m ready to deal with when I just want to pretend to drive a truck or a tractor for a bit
I mean, they can be set up, but without the vendor software that only runs on Windows, it can be really kludgy
