use kali Linux in a virtual machine because haha funny 1337 haxor
install mint/popOS/ubuntu on either a virtual machin, a spare laptop, or dual boot if you have a spare drive
I used mint for school and random tinkering and just gradually got more familiar with the random things I wanted to do or fix
this was last year so I’m no where near qualified to talk like a guru of ancient wisdom, take all of this with a grain of salt or possibly just burn it
The Arch wiki article already states it’s unmaintained since January 2023. So Arch users have had almost a year to find another solution at this point.
So… install a minimal distro image and the usual with the only caveat of being forced to type something that I want to run in the CLI instead of setting up hotkeys? Such challenge, much horror.
Focus learning on how to install Arch Linux and use it without breaking. This not just gives you a rock-stable distro, but also the required knowledge on to maintain Linux OS.
Or go with “Ubuntu” level of easiness. You choose. :)
I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general?
Oh yes, that’s exactly how I learnt. Also I have 1000+ edits in Arch Wiki, but stopped contributing to it (as well as AUR) few years ago.
Assuming this isn’t a troll post, why wouldn’t it be possible? Not everything has an open source alternative that’s nearly as good. I use Linux, I like open source, but I still use Discord and google services and occasionally a bunch of other closed source apps like Steam. Not everything ever made has to be open source.
If you’re going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).
Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5’s UX the main reason I didn’t like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn’t do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.
It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn’t know how (and still don’t even now).
If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.
And for the record I don’t like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.
If you don’t mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.
Pacman (Arch’s package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there’s the AUR on top.
Also while I’ve never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier
It’s easier to think about Linux on the context of what an individual application needs to run. Pretty much everything you do will have these components.
configuration
an executable
a communication mechanism (dbus, networking, web server, etc)
something that decides if the application runs or not (systemd, monit, docker/docker compose, kubernetes scheduler, or you as the user)
a way of accepting input (keyboard and mouse, web requests, database queries, etc)
a way of delivering an output (logging to unique log files, through syslog, or to stdout/stderr, showing something on a screen, playing a sound, returning a message to the client, etc)
storage (optional)
some cpu and memory capacity
That’s really it. If something isn’t working, it’s pretty much exclusively going to fall into one of those categories. What that means is going to vary significantly from app to app but understanding this is how literally everything works makes the troubleshooting process a lot easier.
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