Everyone is a bit lost at first… That’s the first step to becoming an expert.
Great that you’re trying to learn something new!
At least you watched a video first, I just install shit and hope for the best lol
The OG route. I started in 1995/96 and it was all groping around in the dark and hoping to find a helpful book at Borders.
Same, a 15 minute video is way too long. I would rather spend 15 hours debugging
Same, a 15 minute video is way too long. I would rather spend 15 hours debugging
I want that on a shirt…but if I buy the shirt, I’m afraid of the burn when my life partner will probably set the shit out for me to wear on certain weekends…
We are not all devs/sysadmins. For a long time thought I didn’t really know what I was doing, until one day someone had an issue running an old game and I looked at the error and could tell them how to fix it by editing the launch script.
Last Sunday I groggily ran an update on my EOS install, which promptly borked Plasma. Rolled back via timeshift which then destroyed my bootloader. Fired up a live USB, reinstalled the bootloader, peace was restored to the galaxy.
I’ll be honest, the existential dread of losing a sunday to reinstalling my system was at the forefront of my mind most of the morning, but the sweet relief of booting into my system after all was said and done was fantastic.
Been using Linux for several decades now. I’ve always been able to throw in a floppy or a CD, or now a thumbdrive and just boot up and easily fix what’s wrong. Plus it’s rare to even have to do that. The times I’ve used Windows, when things go wrong, if it’s not a simple fix, best you can do is format and reinstall. I have friends who are so numb to that. But they figure, they might as well since they’ll just have have to format Windows and reinstall anyways because, Windows gets slower over time. I have one friend who had it on his calendar to just monthly reinstall Windows. I’ve never once thought, wow Linux is getting slow, let me format and reinstall. I mean, how can that even be an acceptable solution to anybody. Sure, if things just went sideways so badly and everything is corrupted, but that would be one hell of an extreme exception.
Congratulations. Your a system admin. For real.
I’ve interviewed candidates for system admin jobs who had less exposure to managing Linux then this story.
I tried like three times to daily drive linux before it finally stuck.
Three steps for me.
- Linux on a laptop
- Dual boot on my main pc.
- Full switch done in spite after windows nuked my linux partition.
Haha nice! Similar journey! My step 3 was when Win10 kept BSODing my games, and then being more subtly broken when I booted it up.
“Okay, I’ll just ‘refresh this PC’.” I said.
“Can’t.” Said Win10.
“Why not?” Says I.
“Lol-idk” says Win10 with an indifferent shrug.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed runs all my creative artwork tasks AND all my games run beautifully. Just pointed Steam to the folder and it handled everything automagically.
Game doesn’t crash anymore on the same hardware, BTW.
Tumbleweed my beloved. ❤️
My steps:
- Think about dual-booting
- Try to install Nobara as dual-boot
- Fuck up Windows install
- Too lazy to reinstall Windows
- ???
- Now own Steam Deck, have old ThinkPad and PC running Fedora
Not dissimilar - my three steps.
- Ran away from vista.
- Get a job at Microsoft and figured I should learn how to use a core product again (Windows 10).
- Dual boot for years (you never know when you will need to wake up the windows for some random task), until Win 11 and recall…
I’ve been playing with Linux for almost 20 years and only wiped my windows partition maybe 2 years ago. I figured I can run a windows VM on my Proxmox rig, but I haven’t had the need to yet (probably helps that I’m not big into gaming).
Me too. My final reason to not go back to windows was that I realized I didn’t actually really care for the games I played with restrictive anti cheat and was only playing them because they were popular.
Now I just play games that I consciously acknowledge I’m enjoying playing, and that has been great for mental health as well.
This is the way.
If you’ve got the drive to learn, there’s no better way to learn than by doing, and there’s a lot of doing in Arch, especially on your first couple of installs. Welcome to the club.
Yeah may I recommend using something simpler than arch. I would recommend Linux mint if u want something that’s not gonna break every 15minutes and give u headache.
Thanks, I am liking the challenge at the moment.
Thata how i learnt. Arch + i3. Broke it a couple times, but learnt alot
Same. Time Shift was a god send in those first few months. But that was the only way I was going to learn…
This is how I feel a lot of times. But I did at least have the sense to go for Endeavour rather than straight to Arch (and prior to that, Manjaro and Ubuntu).
I started with Manjaro. Unfucking that system has taught me more than any “stable” distro could. It’s all a matter of determination.
Welcome to the party.
😆 I gave up as soon as I lost my GUI
It’s funny that they claim to be more stable than vanilla Arch because of their own repositories. My Manjaro installation broke itself very frequently after half a year of use. My Endeavour now is much more stable and reliable.
I ditched kubuntu for endeavor on my htpc because it was more stable.
The only time i tried manjaro it was broken from the start in the sense that it defaulted to Wayland and didn’t set the appropriate nvidia flags. Back then I knew nothing and didn’t know how to do much of Anything so ended up back to mint lol
Endeavour is just freaking lovely. The community is really chill and welcoming, too.
Also all the ethereal purple space aesthetic is rad. We gotta get them some proper artwork haha. (Some of it seems generated)
I switched from Windows to Mint this week and I’m also that derpy dragon
Are you me?! Also just migrated to Mint, and I’m really impressed. Good level of polish, and stuff just works out of the box.
Currently still have it on dual boot, I’ll give it a week or two and I don’t need Windows in that time I’ll move it to my main M2 SSD and ditch M$
I was you six months ago.
Formated the W10 drive before christmas as I never spun it up anymore. Have fun in Linux!
I tried it from a USB drive first and when I saw how easy it is I just took the leap and fully switched.
My biggest worry was gaming but even there was no problem at all
Heh. I just went from a Chromebook to mint.
Honestly baffled by the basics. Currently youtubing how to mount a NFS share from (on?) my NAS.
Not 100% sure if there’s an easy-mode for this one but just a friendly reminder to copy fstab to
fstab.oldorfstab.backupso you can revert to it if something doesn’t go right. :)Thanks! When I get distracted common steps do go out of the window :)
Hyprland was the first time I had to look up what a window manager was XD
I got this
That doesn’t look quite right.
Doesn’t look totally wrong, either. I mean… there are windows.
It’s pretty though
Indeed! I immediately had to take a picture 😂
Ah, this is fine.
I need this as my desktop background lmao
Sadly, I did not know how to Screenshot that, but it definitely would be my background now if I would’ve managed it.
This pic goes so hard
Why didn’t you just screenshot with slurp /s
I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.
Is nobara really more familiar territory than arch? I’d never heard of it before. Arch may not always hold your hand, but it’s extremely well documented.
Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.
I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.
Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.
Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.
And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.
Arch as a first distro is an interesting choice.
But likely fr better than my first distro, Slackware.
I had known about the Church of the Subgenius and then heard that there was a Linux distro based on that…
At the time, the wikis were not really up to the task…
These days I run Mint on my writing laptop, and unfortunately am back to Windows on my gaming rig.
But might swap back to Gaurda for gaming…
I agree with you for a hobby OS. Like if somebody wants to learn and knows generally how to back up what they don’t want to lose, Arch is invaluable! I’m currently enjoying EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop for how newb-friendly the community is.
If someone just wants a working machine that allows them to dabble if they’re feeling it, Mint is good for that. Not everyone’s gotta be a sysadmin right?
I personally feel like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great balance though.
It works, yet it rolls, and you can still mess around if you want. Although it’s sometimes frustrating when it does things differently than Arch or Ubuntu and the advice is scant… But I guess that’s it’s own learning experience!
I occasionally make a project out of learning things like compiling software, but it doesn’t demand too much maintenance when I just need to get stuff done.
I feel like with the Arch distributions like EndeavourOS and CachyOS it’s a lot easier nowadays.
As a developer and sysadmin, I welcome you.