Every linux enthusiast should try Qubes at least once. The architecture is totally different, vastly more secure in many ways than most Linux distros. It’s definitely not for everybody, but if privacy and security rank high on your priority list it’s worth a look. It never ends up in Linux top ten lists for some reason, but it’s an incredible OS.
Friendo, I think once you understand exactly what an OS is, you’ll have fewer problems. An OS is just a layer on top of hardware with a lot of scripts and tools that enable that hardware to do things like move files, show graphics, and send audio in a desktop environment. Never issue a root or sudo command unless you understand exactly what it’s doing. Following this one simple rule will save you a lot of trouble, same as any Windows machine.
This is reasonably valid. I think Windows makes it a bit harder to do real damage to your system, so I’m used to that. I also have borked installs in VMs before, but that’s never mattered because spinning up a new one takes no time. Definitely a valuable lesson to do more research before running commands, especially as sudo
Nah. This is old school thought. Use an immutable distro if this is your concern, and keep all your files on a NAS, or something else that can replay your files. Local images of your entire filesystem isn’t needed anymore.
And a lot of configuration, or so I thought? I’m investing heavily but I’m scared for my investments :-)
Another Linux noob here, after a couple of Linux servers (Tenfingers, Lemmy) switched over (finally) my main PC, or well kids got the gaming machine and I’m on a Mint ThinkPad now :-) and a backup think centre tiny if the Lemmy server bails out.
I have this little windows box to print stuff (I didn’t know I hated printers) and every time I use it I’m so happy I don’t need windows in my personal life anymore…
Except that I’m jumping ship to Linux fully, I’m thinking a lot about hardware failure, not the data but say the mobo, so maybe that’s curious. Seemed you were knowledgeable about those things, or I’m explaining very badly.
If you are an advanced linux user then I would suggest giving a try to the following distros: arch, void, gentoo and (like you said in the post) nixOS.
The reason behind is that this distros are focused on the tinkering aspect of linux, the experience of setting up everything the way you want.
If you want to give a shot to WMs I would suggest i3, sway, dwm, dwl, river, bspwm, Qtile and hyperland (maybe focus more on the Wayland ones if you want to try the latest software).
If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.
Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what’s wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.
At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say “oh, it just broke” and leave it at that.
I think I know what the issue was… I modified the grub.cfg file and ran grub2-mkconfig and I think it was saying it detected a Linux install at my root partition, but didn’t seem to recognize my /boot or /boot/efi partitions and I couldn’t figure out how to edit that via the grub cli. If that wasn’t the case, then that’s okay. I’ll make sure to teach myself a bit more about the bootloader before trying to edit it again
I recommend you try Gentoo and DWM. You don’t have to use this setup forever, but at least try setting it up. Installing Gentoo, patching DWM and st, etc. is fun and it’s an interesting experience. If you want to use Wayland, check out dwl and the foot terminal emulator. Perhaps you’re actually gonna like Gentoo and stick with it, I think it’s a great distro. They also provide binaries for larger programs, so you don’t have to compile stuff like Firefox. But definitely try out custom kernels.
xdg-open is one of the most used commands on my system. Video files, movies, pdfs, etc if I want to use the default application to open anything I use it. No need to memorize each application’ commands.
I’ve messed up my system so many times over the years that now I think I secretly get excited when it accidentally happens. Maybe I’m a masochist, but I actually enjoy trying to understand what went wrong. A USB stick with a light weight Linux distro and chroot you can usually get back in there and look around at the damage.
In my first few weeks of linux I screwed up mounting a hard drive and my pc wouldn’t boot past grub. 4x different times I tried and each time I broke it. Then a year later I revisted mounting the drive and it went smoothly.
My least favorite is Linux Lite. It’s supposed to be a lighter, simpler version of Ubuntu but I don’t think it accomplishes this at all. It’s very slow for something that’s supposed to be lightweight, and still includes Snaps, which are also very much not lightweight. Plus its software center is just bad, which is not great for something that’s marketed at Linux noobs. Linux Mint XFCE or SpiralLinux are better options for a Linux noob who needs a lighter distro, IMO.
An improvement I’d suggest: obviously, ditch Snaps. Another would be to take a look at what Bodhi Linux does and have the “software center” run in the browser. I don’t know how good this is security-wise, but it definitely speeds things up from the UX side of things.
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