looking for anything to remember the hierarchy and memorizing the metric and Celsius measurement system, sometimes explained in schooling or local sayings. (if I had an example for those systems I would give one lol).

This is how I was taught it in school:

The same

I knew, as soon as they installed that damned GUI, that we’d have Windowers coming around with their “Windows key this and WSL that”. I’m going to have to move to BSD at this rate, I hear they have a more permissive license. I was telling my friend Margaret just the other day that I was meaning to move to BSD. That and that I wanted to get a shrubbery, for the garden.

The terminal is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

Just don’t expect it will make you faster or more efficient.

It will, but it requires you spend a lot of time dealing with being slow and wanting to give up and reach for the mouse.

I swapped keyboard layouts (to a 52 key split layout) and it took me around 2-3 weeks of typing slow, hitting the wrong keys, and keeping several printed sheets (for all of the keyboard layers) on my desk in order to learn the layout. It was frustrating and it would have been a lot easier to just grab a standard keyboard but, in the end, it was worth it.

Learning vimkeys/application hotkeys does take a while and it is much easier to avoid it for any given task. Just grab the mouse and avoid the frustration of having to try to remember the hotkey (or, even worse, look it up). But if you can avoid that and force yourself through the uncomfortable frustration. You’ll find that the time investment is worth it.

The best way I’ve heard it described is that learning all of the motions, shortcuts, commands, etc is the best way to remove all of the possible friction between you having a thought and you putting that thought into text.

It’s like using Word and learning that CTRL+B toggles Bold. You don’t NEED to know that, you can click the bold icon. The extra 2 seconds that it took to grab the mouse and click the icon and then move your hand back to the keyboard seems trivial, but if you’re doing a lot of writing that can add up to a lot.

In addition, having to stop your train of thought in order to fiddle with a GUI can cause lapses in concentration. Constantly having to stop typing in order to fiddle with a GUI is annoying and requires you to switch context from what you were typing to looking for the icon or menu that you need to click.

Multiply that by everything else you need to do in editing text (moving the cursor to different places, selecting text, finding text, opening and saving documents, etc. That’s a lot of time that you’re spending messing around with a mouse and GUI annoyances.

Also, if you’re using Linux, a lot of tools use vim keys as their interface. So learning the basics (mostly hjkl for moving, / for searching, etc) can help you in a lot of programs.

For example, I’m using vimium in Firefox, so I can operate the entire browser without using the mouse. Press f and all of the links and form fields on the page are tagged with a 2 letter combination, pressing those two letters is like clicking the link/field. I can access shortcuts, open bookmarks, etc all without needing my mouse. In addition, the browser has hotkeys for tab manipulation (ctrl t for new tab, ctrl f4 to close tab, ctrl shift t to re-open/undo last closed tab, etcetc).

I try to have all of my programs be keyboard driven (and use a lot of terminal applications where possible). Vim keys and motions, in all of the various programs that use them, along with the shortcuts from the window manager (everyone knows alt + tab, but there are many more) and even individual applications make that possible (except for Freetube, which requires the mouse :/).

Overall, I would say that it’s not a requirement, but if you’re willing to spend a week or two learning (and moving very slow as you force yourself to learn and use the keys) then I think you’ll have a better time in Linux.

Also, it feels pretty ‘90s hacker movie hacker’ to just flail on the keyboard and have things happen on your PC.

I have a git repo of a bunch of stowed configs and scripts, and use Arch, btw

Should be easy to fix, just edit your configuration.nix file…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre

It’s essentially a kernel with only open source code. OP would need to research all of the hardware in their machine to ensure that there are open source drivers. I think there are some laptop manufacturers that sell units which are compatible, if you’re ordering from one of the major manufacturers then you’ll likely have some hardware (like wifi) that requires proprietary binaries.

The hardest part is usually finding a machine that has open source drivers for every component. You may have to do some kernel compiling and other low level tasks to get your specific setup to work. OP says they’re not a power user, but after this they will be

Around '99 or '00. A friend of mine was gifted a Linux Magazine subscription and made me a copy of the CD. It was noteworthy at the time because it didn’t have any copy protection and we were neck deep in piracy, keeping our friend group supplied with copies of games that we pulled off of IRC.

Getting a CD full of software that made no effort to prevent copying was intriguing enough that we sacrificed a spare machine one weekend (giving up the ability to play LAN StarCraft!) to see what another operating system looked like.

We tinkered on and off for a year, once we could get dual boot working (thanks to the IRC crowd) we used it a bit more often. Mostly ricing, though that wasn’t a term at the time, and playing with the hacking tools (for educational purposes only, of course).

I think there was some copy protection mode that was annoying to write on Windows but trivially easy on Linux, which was the first time that I can remember where it was just better than Windows. That, and ARP poisoning our LAN parties to packet capture and read people’s AIM and ICQ conversations because we were little shits.

There goes the Q4 profit goals of the FOSS community.

I have 20+ remote systems I need to maintain and apps like this provide tabbed experience like a browser to connect to them.

I’ve found that if you’re using ssh then taking your hands off the keyboard to grab a mouse just to click a different tab is slow and annoying.

I use a terminal multiplexer, tmux, and just keep different sessions open for each server that I need to connect to.

leader = CTRL+b (you can change this but this is the default)

leader s - Open session manager
leader c - Open new window in the session
leader 0-9 - Swap to Window 0-9
leader % - Split screen vertically
leader left/right arrow, move between split screens
leader z - full screen the active screen
leader d - disconnect from the tmux session
etc

tmux -a to re-connect to the tmux session

There’s a ton of hotkeys and plugins that can handle essentially anything you’d like to do. Once you learn the few hotkeys (print a cheatsheet and force yourself to use the hotkeys).

Go install WIndows 11 if this is what you want punk.

Don’t install Ubuntu 25.10 if this isn’t what you want. Using Ubuntu means accepting that they’re going to make a lot of decisions about your system. The whole point of these large pre-configured Linux distros is that they make all of the decisions for you.

If you want more control than that try installing one of the other distros that allow you to choose the software you want.

tldr is very useful

Also, knowing vim keys is useful because a lot of terminal programs use them.

Well, I also have some bad news for the users of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Target, FedEx, Dell, Lowe’s, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Publix, Intel, HP, United Airlines, Nike, Oracle, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dow Chemical Company, Best Buy, Cargill, Koch Industries, H-E-B, Love’s, JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson,

…I could go on.

OP:

It’s super useful to make custom 3D prints.

I’ve been using a script to generate custom nameplates which are oriented such that the face is parallel to the build plate, so I can swap filament colors when it transitions from the nameplate to the name.

I could do this manually in CAD, but it would take a huge amount of time. Now I just edit a script file, alter a string or two and adjust some spacing values and get a ready to print model.

Pretty neat

I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.

You’re a power user who has enough technical knowledge to deal with the issues of running bleeding edge.

I’d say Arch, even the manual install isn’t too complicated once you’ve done it a few times and then you’ll have access to the latest and greatest packages.

Occasionally this results in some weird bugs. For example, currently, when waking from suspend my HDMI outputs fail to connect until I change the display properties, so I wrote a bash script to toggle the refresh rate and bound that to a hotkey so I can recover without a display. I’m sure in a day or two a system update will fix it and, if not, I know how to locate the problem (in the system log: kernel: nvidia-modeset: WARNING: GPU:0: HDMI FRL link training failed. ) and report it on the appropriate bug tracker.

If this doesn’t sound intimidating then you’ll be fine as an Arch user.

Oh yeah, you gotta get rid of S mode before you can do essentially anything.

I’ve only dealt with one laptop that came with that ‘feature’ so I just ignored all of the warnings that they’ve posted around the official way of disabling it (I mean “Enabling Developer Mode”, i.e. regular Windows)

Oh yeah, Microsoft has really leaned into the dark patterns.

You don’t ever need to launch edge, you can just use winget now:

winget install Mozilla.Firefox

or

winget install Google.Chrome