I’ve also got the Linux Basics for Hackers book but it’s at home while I’m on vacation.
I’m just really happy rn yall :) this install took some work, SecureBoot kept getting in the way and I’m not the most savvy person so there was a lot of Googling and trial and error in the way of getting here.
Welcome! Don’t listen to anyone trying to shame you for your distro choice. The most important is that you didn’t choose windows.
Mint’s a pretty nice distro, all things considered. The only one I’d turn my nose up against is Manjaro, mostly because of their leadership’s reputation as clowns.
Your distro of choice is a good distro unless you chose anything other than TempleOS
No, no! Listen to the shamers! Change your distro eight times over the first month as you listen to them whine, and eventually return to the first one you chose, full of wisdom of why those other distros suck so you can tell the noobs who choose one of them first instead of your glorious choice!
Thanks! I plan to experiment with others, but I wanted a nice smooth transition for my wife and I both, so Mint seemed like a great starting point.
I’ve been daily driving mint for over a year now, gotta say, never been tempted by anything else. It really is solid and functional and easy to work with. The only issue I’ve ever had with the system was programs closing randomly, and turns out I was just running out of ram. Fixed that by adding more swap (using part of the hard drive as back up ram).
Having come from windows, it’s really nice to not have to search through 5 different settings menus, not to mention not having changes I made reverted at every update.
Mint is rad. I currently use barebones Debian testing with a bunch of customized stuff, but I always keep a bootable Mint flash drive on my keychain. It’s a very solid choice
Quick tip: forgot how to use a command? Use
man commandnameto see a short manual page for that command.Forgot sudo on your command?
!!refers to the previously typed command, so you can simply typesudo !!to fix it.If you don’t know how to use man, just type in
man man.tldr or teeldeer is the short manual. fwiw
“I’m just really happy rn yall” - be careful with that rn command if you’re anywhere near Arch, wouldn’t want all your happy uninstalled! Seriously though, good for you! Welcome to freedom.
If you want to mess with the command line, I recommend tldr. Anyone could do xkcd’s tar challenge if they can run
tldr tarfirst! (pretty sure it’s in mint’s apt repos)tar --help
You’ll probably be making lots of changes to your computer over the next couple of weeks, so it’s a good idea to use TimeShift to make system snapshots. (It works like System Restore in Windows). It can even rescue an unbootable system. Just boot from your Linux Live CD / flash drive and you can run TimeShift from that.
Whoah… wish I knew about this when I was setting up my raspberry pi. Got a brand new computer on the way (well half of it is here already) so this might come in handy… thanks!
FYI, you can usually automate creating timeshifts whenever you add packages or update your system. I did that for mine, so that I don’t have to remember to do it.
I highly recommend taking the time to really look into btrfs for anyone interested in utilizing timeshift. There is no going back.
the only downside to btrfs, is the good natured arguments you’ll get into online over how to pronounce it.
