Definitely yes! Pop OS is one of the best distros for starters, along with Linux Mint. Basic tasks like web browsing, playing games, and writing docs all work well on Pop OS. If you have familiarity with macOS, you’ll notice that Pop OS is very similar when it comes to layout and certain multi-touch gestures.
I’ve been experimening with a few beginner friendly linux distros such asUbuntu, Pop os linux mint etc in a a virtual machine. Since i don’t know much about linux as i have never used it, it’s quite difficult for me to get things working for now. I’ve been using Windows for years as it’s the"default" operating system everywhere and lately I’ve been reading stuff about privacy and open source so i don’t want to use windows for that reason and more. Where do i learn more about linux system so i can get more familiar with it? I don’t want to break things up because of my curious nature so it would be nice if there was a detailedtutoriall covering basic or possibly advanced stuff.
it’s quite difficult for me to get things working for now.
What sort of things are you having problems with?
Where do i learn more about linux system so i can get more familiar with it?
Most of us learned by being curious and poking around, reading on Google or asking our friends who use Linux. If you don’t have friends who use Linux the community is also great, asking in forums such as this one will likely get you answers and explanations for things. Pop is based on Debian, Ubuntu is also based on Debian, so most things that apply to one apply to the other, in fact the vast majority of things that apply to one Linux apply to most of not all, which is why a lot of people look to the Arch Linux wiki for answers even if they don’t use Arch themselves.
I don’t want to break things up because of my curious nature
You will break things, consider this a fact because it will happen, Linux gives you too much access, so if you don’t know what you’re doing you might shoot yourself in the foot, but that’s fine because you would have learnt something important in the process.
So if you’re going to break things, how can we make it easier for you to recover? On Linux different drives or partitions don’t show up as different letters on the “my computer” like they do on Windows, instead they need to be mounted onto a folder. This means that you can have folder A and folder B side by side but both being in different drives inside a folder C that is in yet another drive. That sounds confusing, but we can use this to our advantage, the root of the Linux filesystem is / everything is inside that folder, so for example the full path to your user directly is /home/ whereas the full path to the Firefox binary (which you can check by running which firefox on a terminal) is something like /bin/firefox. When you’re installing a system you can partition the disk (or if you have multiple disks) and select each one of them to mount in a different place on boot, to do that on most installers you need to select manual partitioning or something like that, then you select one partition of at least 100GB (you can do a lot less for testing on your VM, this is my recommendation for your actual system) to be mounted on /, then you select a partition of at least the same amount as your RAM to be swap (swap is essentially a RAM in disk, this is used when you run out of RAM, or when you want to hybernate), and finally the remaining space you put to mount on /home. Remember how I said your user home directory was inside /home? So that means that now your user home directory is in a separate partition from the system, but why would you want that? Simple, because now if you break your system, or want to reinstall it for whatever reason, you’ll only format the partition you used for /, leaving the one on /home untouched, which means that all of your personal files, configurations, etc get preserved. You’ll only lose the system, programs installed, and other such things which are easily recoverable. If you do this, the worst case scenario for your curiosity is around half an hour of reinstalling the system before you’re back to where you started without losing anything important.
Hmmm…given the beginner friendly nature of distros like Linux Mint and Pop OS, I doubt you will find much tutorials centered around those distros (though you will definitely find a lot of commentators and reviewers talking about these distros and how “great” they are). However, if you want to learn about Linux as a whole, then there are definitely some great resources you can use to help you with that.
What is your preferred learning method? Do you like learning through reading, or do you prefer an online video tutorial where someone is simultaneously talking and demonstrating?
I tried watching courses for beginners on YouTube but most of them justshow how to install the OS andthe general overview of how to do basic things. While usingPopOss And Linux mint i tried unintalling softwares without internet and all it takes me to error page on their app store. I don’t want to learn basic stuff by doing trial and error if i can learn it as a whole using a tutorial.
it’s quite difficult for me to get things working for now. […]
Where do i learn more about linux system so i can get more familiar with it?
You said it was difficult “to get things working” - identify what exactly is it that you’re finding difficult, then type that into Google/DuckDuckGo and check the results. If there’s anything in that results you don’t understand, Google/DDG it further. Keep doing that until you understand everything that you want to about that topic. Then proceed to the next topic.
There are also IRC, Discord and Matrix chat rooms for most Linux distros out there, so if you’re unable to find an answer, feel free to hop into one of those channels and ask a question.
ChatGPT is also a decent resource for general understanding - but don’t type any commands it suggests (unless you know what you’re doing!).
I would get comfortable with the idea of breaking things. Make regular backups of your data. The best that I’m aware of for making it easy to work backwards from breaking things is NixOS, but I wouldn’t consider it beginner friendly.
You learn a lot from trying to bring a system back online. But it depends if you’re trying Linux to learn it more or just to take advance of privacy.
I don’t want to break my system drastically if i were to learn along the way using it without any knowledge. I want a stable os while also doing stuff I’d normally do on Windows.
It shouldn’t break if you just install packages from the main app installer. It’s more of a concern if you’re trying to install anything from source.
Also make sure to try a live cd or live USB to make sure the OS is compatible with your hardware. VM is not sufficient for this last one. This is usually only an issue if you have very new hardware.
I’d argue for a basic use case most distro’s would work well, right? All come with a browser, a PDF reader, and some word doc/spreadsheet program. I truly hate using windows at school, so I just plug in a USB, restart, and boot from the USB. Otherwise Firefox always needs updating, which results in freezing 1/10 times, and I need to make an adobe account to simply read a PDF.
All come with a browser, a PDF reader, and some word doc/spreadsheet program.
Strictly speaking, “All” is a bit of a stretch - Arch doesn’t come with any of those by default, neither does Gentoo, or for that matter, nor do any of the minimal/netinstall/server variants of other distros.
NVK is a Vulkan driver while nouveau is an OpenGL driver. If I understand correctly there’s also a nouveau kernel module which interfaces with the userspace nouveau, but NVK might use another API. [1]
Apparently this is a new driver which uses the open source headers and Linux kernel modules from nVidia’s proprietary drivers, and it doesn’t borrow very much from nouveau driver because that one has different names for things in their headers due to the clean room reverse engineering aspect of nouveau. Although I am not an expert on this so I could be wrong.
Setup a good kickstart script (even if it’s just enough for Ansible to Configure it the rest of the way). It’s awesome when messing with a system to be able to reboot select the reinstall PXE boot option and get a fresh install to tinker on.
Being pro-FOSS does not mean you are anti proprietary software. There’s plenty of middle ground.
Video games, for example, where the company might not want to open source their server code for plenty of very legitimate reasons.
Mail is a super important utility. For physical mail, it’s a felony for anybody to open it. For digital mail, gmail open, reads, and inserts ads before handing it to you. It’s ok to think some things are important enough to mandate FOSS, and some things not.
I personally do not think it is conflicting, especially when you consider how hard or impractical it is to completely avoid the non-free/proprietary software. Services like Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook, to name a few, have been around for a long time, and they have become so entrenched in our daily lives and social circles that avoiding them completely and all at once may be too disruptive. I’ve been using Facebook since I was in high school, and that’s also the platform I use to communicate with my closest friends. To suddenly jump away from that and expect my closest friends to follow me to the next major platform (e.g. Mastodon) is going to take a lot of effort and convincing, especially if my friends have people they connect with on Facebook and are not likely to move to another platform.
The same can be said for YouTube, even with their ridiculous anti-adblocker stance. People have become so invested in it that completely breaking away from YouTube would be almost impossible. Thankfully, that’s where services like Piped and PeerTube come into play.
I think what really matters is that people at least make the effort to utilize FOSS whenever and wherever possible. Whether that be a Linux distribution over Windows and Mac, or a FOSS alternative to one of Google’s or Microsoft’s products, or a federated platform like Lemmy and Mastodon, there are so many ways we can demonstrate our love and support for FOSS, and utilizing a non-free/proprietary service does not make us any less committed to FOSS.
This kind of question comes up in many areas. And which software you use is less critical compared to politics. Of course you can use google and advocate foss, if your question is to be taken literally. It would not be the best thing you could do, but what would even be the best thing? Using software is not helping anyone (exept for software that takes your data or mines crypto while you use it or something). You would need to donate, contribute or bring people to do these things to really help the software/devs. Use which software/service you are comfortable with using.
thank you, you’re right, I love open source, I will contribute to it. And by the way, this is an extreme opinion, but Discord is an open source hybrid!! It’s mostly open source but it’s got proprietary blobs.
There are other issues with Discord relating to privacy, which would even with a libre client (I think there is one? Bettercord or fosscord or something?) be a good reason to avoid it.
But I understand that there are important communities on there.
Using free software is the important part, IMO. Not using non-free software is a good wishlist item. But of course there are those who differ with me. :)
but Richard Stallman himself uses a completely free (libre) laptop and even his GNU/Linux distro is 100% free, so he is living by his example!! But ok, can I still use Discord and promote free software?? Woa >u<
I remember when it was considered a mark of professionalism for a web developer to have an email on their own domain. At some point that changed. I think after GMail came out it was so good that everybody switched to that.
The domain isn’t all that important, the IP address of the mail server is. I pay an external service that provides a mail server, and my DNS records point to that.
But hosting my own mail server, while possible is not recommended.
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