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!
Perhaps pot is the only issue you care about now, but a vote for anyone except Biden is functionally a vote for Trump, who will give you much bigger issues to worry about. So, the smart thing to do here is to vote Biden.
A vote for Stein or West is functionally equivalent to driving to the ballot box just to rip up your ballot and drive home.
I meant vote Libertarian in the context of the issue OP cares about, I didn’t mean I advocated Libertarians. Jesus guys, anyone here have any respect for individualistic self-determination in democracy?
Lol, we already have Libertarian weed, it’s called the black market. I’d honestly prefer to go to a legal, local business and pay the taxes, at least my consumption would actually help my community then.
No. The Libertarian party is the least coherent of the four, and you can’t count on any consistency in their platform. They seem to do zero policing of their candidates’ attitudes.
Technically Biden, but ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh. He isn’t pro-legalisation but is the most likely route. As the cannabis industry gains more money and momentum it’s really just a matter of time, but there are Republicans actively fighting against it. So, do with that, what you will. Also don’t be fooled by libertarians, they will try to draw you in with pot and legal sex work, but that’s a trap.
It’s funny that this is on AskLemmy and not some linux-specific community. Reinforces the image that Lemmy users are the more computer-savvy people (which I find great!)
To be fair IMO you at least need some mindset that like okay this isn’t working, how can I tackle that? Rage isn’t sufficient in the long term and Lemmy itself isn’t exactly user friendly just yet.
It’s a bizarre new medium after all. I love it, maybe partly because of it.
I would argue that now, it’s as user friendly as Reddit is. But, alas, now is too late 😔. There was a wave of instances dissappearing over night (vlemmy, fmhy, etc.), mods abusing power and… well, that crowd just felt safer with commercial media. At least their data and shared images won’t drown into oblivion if an instance owner decided to just close shop 🤷.
Weell, I mean it’s not far far away but tell me how to make a correct link on Lemmy (and I will not ask for the meaning of 20047 or the Englishy greenish color 😉):
It will all fall together in the end IMO but there are still a couple things to iron out.
Must say I like the smaller world here where everything (almost nothing?) isn’t driven by some dopamine kick selling point😊
For disappearing communities, it’s a shame but I hope it’s just communities thinking they could be new Reddit subs, which IMO is (excepted small established niche subs) very different from at least what I think a Lemmy community ‘should’ be.
and I will not ask for the meaning of 20047 or the Englishy greenish color 😉
It’s NO in ASCII and I’m not a native English speaker… and this thing doesn’t have auto correct, underline or suggestions 😒 (Jerboa).
The correct way to share a community on Lemmy (so that apps recognize it as a Lemmy community) is with an exclamation mark, as in your last example. The search in Jerboa (as is with other apps) is broken, doesn’t work like it should. Use the web UI search on your instance, you’ll find the community.
Thanks, and it works today, guess my instance had some hiccup yesterday…
Ah yes of course! I was thinking of the leet codes put in stack memory or something 😁 (like IIRC Nintendos DS compiler put 0xDEAD all over it some other was 0xC0FFEE… etc, it was to catch stack overflows).
I don’t understand what problem you’re trying to describe. The first link is incomplete, and the second one takes me to the watercolour community on Lemmy.ml.
It didn’t use to be like that after the first wave, with comms such as sewing, there were some gardening subs as well… the only one that kinda took off was the woodworking sub, that’s it.
I opened a few subs myself, related to tech, but not really computer related, none of them took off, only a few posts at the beginning and that was basically it, no new posts whatsoever.
I’m of the opinion that computer textbooks are out of date the second they are published. That one was published in 2017, so 6 years ago, which is an eternity. It might have some generally useful advice, but in terms of resources, google and online wikis are going to be more up to date (still probably outdated, but less so, and free).
The big difference is that a book is structured to teach you bit by bit. One of the issues of learning a new subject is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Something structured like a book solves this.
That being said, a six year old book is ancient when talking about computer related stuff…
YouTube still tracks you based on your IP and other environmental variables. Your browser’s user agent alone can tell them something about you. The resolution your screen uses, the speed in which the page loads and many other factors all correlate with certain profile properties.
They may not have your exact name and hometown, but they can definitely generate an indication of income and general area, amongst others.
Also they keep this data over time. This combination of device attributes at a certain location at a certain time is another way they can categorize you
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