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. […]
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!).
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.
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’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.
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!).
What sort of things are you having problems with?
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.
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 runningwhich firefoxon 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/homeuntouched, 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.
Well, if YouTube videos haven’t been much help to you, then perhaps these books will give you what you want:
https://itsfoss.com/best-linux-books/
Thanks for the resources. I’ll check them out.
Here’s a tutorial for removing packages without the app store:
https://itsfoss.com/apt-remove/
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.