Really just start by installing a distro you’re interested in, learn how to set up a grid of terminals as your desktop background, then get in to doing any task you would normally through the terminal. What got me first interested in using linux years ago was the way you could make it look cool and messing around with different desktop environments, and I ended up being a unix admin for over a decade and run it at home wherever possible. I’d definitely do the self-exploration route, just find cool things you want to do on linux as inspiration and go for it. The great thing about linux is you can personalize it so it embodies whatever you love most about computers.
If you’re doing this for potential career that’s different, you’ll want to learn more about managing daemons and security groups, disk provisioning, configuring services like httpd ssh autofs etc. Then get in to things like ansible and remote config/monitoring. At least from my experience, it’s gonna depend on the employer. Kubernetes and enterprise containerized app solutions is what I’d be learning if I was about to enter the field again.
Electric heated clothing is pretty great. USB heated clothes can only accept 10 watts a piece which isnt alot of but its suprisingly enough to keep you warm. Very energy efficent. They make more powerful electric jackets that run on power tool batteries too which are considerably more powerful. The limit to heated clothing is obviously how big a battery you can carry with you but even a 10 watt usb heated clothing has incredible amounts of CLO units (the scientific unit of measurement for the amount of insulation a particular piece of clothing provides
Layers are super important, thermal underwear (pants and shirt) will go miles in keeping you warm. Same with putting on multiple layers of pants, shirts, and jackets. Certain materials are better than others but at the end of the day every piece of clothing you manage to stack is added insulation regardless of material. Plastic synthetic materials beat most natural plant fibers in insulative property. The only natural fibers that really come close is wool.
Wool stuff is generally very good at keeping you warm but it can have a bit of a texture, requires some care when washing, sheds quite a bit, and it has a certain smell you have to adapt to or try really hard to wash out.
If your job just involves a lot of standing like a traffic signaller then you can probably get away with wearing a double puffy blanket as a cloak which will also help tons. I love my double puffy its great.
If you are dealing with fuck-you levels of cold well below freezing it may be worth getting a snowmobile suit, I’ve heard those are incredibly insulating.
Read this article by lowtechmagazine its full of really good info on keeping yourself warm.
Honestly, it depends on what you’re trying to do with your machines. If you are looking for a stable desktop environment, you don’t need to dive that deep. (At least, to start.) Just install the defaults, and read a basic tutorial on using the Bash shell. (Even if you move away from bash, lots of scripts and such use it by default, so a passing familiarity is highly recommended.) Especially learn about installing programs with the package manager. (‘apt-get’ for Mint and other Debian-based distros.) The defaults are gonna be generally sane, especially in Mint. If you want to get into deeper waters from there, you’ll have a stable base to start from.
But. If you want to configure your machine, top to bottom and really understand how Linux works… Install Arch. Not even joking. Arch installation docs are very detailed and walk you through setting up every part of your Linux system. Be prepared for your first time to take a few days to complete. It’s a lot to take in. Start with a computer you can leave offline for awhile.
I learned a ton by installing Arch. And then I went back to Debian-based distros because there was less active maintenance. (Note that this was over a decade ago, so things may be better now. YMMV). This is definitely Learning The Hard Way, but it’s honestly the most effective thing I can think of.
Linux is insanely customizable. You can swap out and/or customize pretty much every aspect of it. It can be overwhelming. I recommend taking things on a bit at a time, but I’ve rarely used software that’s as easy to find free support for.
I’m sort of in between I guess, I’m a senior dev and I mean I get to it when needed like doing that vi ~/.bashrc for an env var (and ~/.bashrc to (re)load it right?), fixing some script or installing “stuff” or so.
Server soft I write is usually for Linux, the rest on Wind. But I also decided to switch my daily driver over and I have a curious mind so if I can’t sleep I’d love to have some big good old book to check out for ‘stuff’ I do not yet know!
Maybe you’re right and I should go on and install everything from scratch (that’s it with Arch right, of am I messing it up with some more bare metal install? A colleague did that compile install everything once a bunch of years ago, he spoke about it for weeks :-).
Gentoo is the og, “Linux from scratch” distro, where you compile everything yourself. Arch is kinda like that, except everything is compiled already. 😁
You still select all the parts of your Linux system, from the desktop environment (if any) all the way down to which initialization system you want to use. Along the way, you’ll dive into a lot of the various text files Linux uses for configuration and learn which files live where.
It’s a very thorough dive!
If you’re looking for reading material about Linux though, I don’t really have any books to recommend offhand… I will say that the basic tooling in Linux, the POSIX-standard stuff, like grep, vi, sed, and so forth remains mostly unchanged (at least in all the important ways) from year to year. Some of it has remained essentially the same since the seventies, so even a six year old book will still be able to cover all of that just fine.
The things that it would not be good for would be some of the more recent developments in, say, UI tech, like the slow, but ongoing migration from X to Wayland.
Command line scripts and config files are likely to largely be the same (though a few files have a tendency to move around depending on the distro).
Tools for administration outside of the venerable POSIX tooling is gonna be a crapshoot in book-form. Still, it’ll give you a place to start from!
asklemmy
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.