Getting Started with Linux

First, a word about Windows: Why?

Yes, I understand why, that Microsoft had and still has all the money behind it, but still, it is weird to me that this uniquely awful operating system is the default on all PCs across the world. It is amazing that anything works at all, and I suspect that if the world’s servers didn’t provide a linux-based backbone, not much would. Every Windows PC ever eventually breaks, and the only option is to reinstall and start over from scratch. They accrue bloat and become so bogged down that they become unusable.

My boomer parents have a desktop that they use mostly to pay bills and browse the internet. Routinely, I’d stop by to tune up their Windows installation. That means I’d clean up the registry and remove spyware, mostly. I’d tell them to avoid clicking links they were sure about, but one of these scams came up on their screen that Windows was broken click here to fix and they ended up paying some scam artist and getting their cards stolen, and I asked them, why did you do that? Why didn’t you call me first? They are proud independent people. They didn’t want to bother me. Well, I’d had enough of this boomer shit, so I installed Kubuntu on their machine, taught them how to click on Firefox, and I haven’t had a problem out of them in three years. Linux just works, and pretty much no boomer ought to be fuckng around with Windows.

The great thing about Linux nowadays is that one can set it up and it just works, but that wasn’t always the case. Back when I started my Linux journey, back in the year 2000, I built my own PC and I didn’t want to pay for Windows, but to get a workng Linux system one had to make sure the hardware was supported by the kernel. I remember that I picked every component based on that. For some reason I remember that the modem I bought, because dial up, had to have a particular Lucent chip. Back then, dependency Hell was a real problem. That’s when one ends up doing down a never-ending rabbit hole trying to satisfied software dependencies. This piece of software needs this piece of sofware to work, and that piece needs this piece, on and on it went. That was before the sophisticated package managers like Pacman or Apt. The positive thing about having started learning Linux back then is that you got a pretty good introduction to how the system worked and how it was organized.

Anyway, I’m not a Linux guru by any stretch of the imagination. I passed CompTIA’s Linux+ certifcation, including a fairly difficult beta test, so I guess I know the basics, and I know enough to search out fixes if I have a problem, and the fixes make sense to me. Every day I interact with Linux I learn something new, though, and I love that about it.

Still, there’s lots of people, the majority of people, who just want the OS to work, and Linux does that now, as my Kubuntu installation to my Boomer parents PC attests. Install Kubuntu or Mint and you’re done. Everything just works. So, if that’s you, I do in fact recommend just installing Kubuntu. Put it on an old machine first to test it if you want, but in almost all circumstances everything just works right out of the box.

If you want to learn linux and begin to harness its astouding power, one must get over his aversion to the command line. There’s no way around that, and indeed, once you get over that aversion, one will not want to get around it because the command line is so damned powerful and efficient. I’ve gotten to the point that I’d rather accomplish tasks using the command line and I don’t much care for most guis. Some things, like browsing or watching videos, guis are pretty necessary, but for file transfers, encoding music files, networking between computers, the command line is powerful and fast. So, I’d say to anyone who wants to start his Linux journey proper, start monkeying around with the command line, learning the basic commands, and probably learn how to use Vim and just embrace that as a default text editor.

As far as distributions, I recommend Arch. It is fast and there’s zero bloat on it. It only has on it what one installs himself. I never found the installation of Arch to be difficult. One just follows the installation guide. All of my PCs run Arch. One caveat about Arch, though, is that it is a rolling release distro that is pretty much always on the bleeding edge of updates, and sometimes it breaks, usually at the first of the month when the newest updates come out. I’ve gotten in the habit of only updating it once a month around the 20th after all the bugs have been discovered and ironed out. Still, though, repair is usually just a matter of rolling back to the previous working version. Linux wants to just work nowadays, I’ve found.

Once one gets down the road with Linux just a little, Windows just becomes so clownishly useless. I can’t even stand having to use it nowadays, like at work and whatnot, and I think about how many billions of dollars are thrown away keeping these awful systems running when dispatching Linux and just demanding people get used to it would save all that waste. Programs on top of programs on top of programs to make Windows secure and work, all of them eating up that precious RAM. It boggles my mind that corporations put up with it.

Anyway, I’d say, if you want to start your Linux journey, just do it. Don’t be afraid of it. Just jump in, start learning the basics of the command line and give yourself plenty of grace to make mistakes. Have fun with it. At some point, you won’t want to turn back.