
Got a sweet offer too
- As up to date as Debian - (Obviously a joke, Debian is great) - Debian is caught up or even past Ubuntu nowadays, shits flipped fr, yo. - Depends what/when you mean. - Debian 12 was released in June and has some newer, and some older, packages than Ubuntu 24.04. For example Ubuntu has LibreOffice 24.2.2 while Debian has 7.4.5. - Debian testing currently has a similar distribution to Ubuntu 24.10, though over the next 6 months it’ll pull ahead of that, but Ubuntu 25.04 will likely have on average newer packages than Debian testing until its beta freeze. - Debian unstable has always had newer packages than the others. 
- Recent update big update or just good maintenance? - Think it’s been maintenance, but the real difference is packages aren’t ancient like they used to be, they’re mostly up to date. - Stuff like the desktop are basically generic compared to Ubuntu’s customization, but they moved to wayland, pipewire, all that stuff which is violent radical by past debian standards. 
 
 
 
- Can’t wait for Linux 8.1 Home Edition 
- That’s how I started using Linux — big book with CD, I think it was “RedHat Linux Secrets 5.4” or something. 2.0 or 2.2 kernel. - Honestly, it was fantastic. And almost all of it is still relevant today. (Some of the stuff on xfree86 and the chap/pap stuff not so much.) - But it gave a really solid (IMHO) intro to a Linux/*NIX system, a solid overview of coreutils, etc. And while LILO has been long replaced, and afaik - /sysdidn’t exist at the time, it formed a good foundation.- I’ll refrain from commenting on any init system changes that have taken place since then. - The RHEL 7 book from OP is most certainly still relevant. For example, my department at work has not managed to switch over to the brand new RHEL 8 machines just yet. 
- I started with a book too. But it was 1996, and the distro was Yggdrasil, and the book was a printout of all the man pages. I used it for a Prolog programming course, so that I didn’t have to go to the university and use their computers. Of course, then I discovered the joys of different flavors of Prolog. - Conectiva for me. More than a mere printout of man pages though, it was actually translated documentation into Portuguese and a really useful intro book. 
 
 
- Knoppix. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. 
- Let me guess. You bought those at Borders? The one next to Starbucks and Chipotle? That was a great bookstore. 
- I’ve been wanting to get an old book like this and go through the install process of some OG linux just for the learning experience. - You want to learn… Suffering? 
- With Slackware, you could probably just follow it step by step. 
 
- I had this book… Threw it out of years ago because every time I moved house, it was a pain to pack and deal with lots of boxes of geeky books. - Besides, most of it is outdated now. New users probably should learn systemd rather than startup scripts. - New users probably should learn systemd rather than startup scripts.  
 
- I was at a used bookshop the other day and found the same Caldera Open Linux 2.2 book and cd that I used to install my first linux distro on a pc. Man that was exciting! - The exact same book, or just another copy? - Another copy. Would have been crazy if it was the exact copy I had. 
 
 
- Just need to find a CD reader, and you are golden. 🤪 - people actually, DONT own one? 
 




