It’s taken decades but I’ve finally decided to cut the Windows cord. And the heck with Mac, too. Looking for a replacement that I can implement and then painlessly transition my lovely wife to, it seems Linux is the answer.
And look! I can put Ubuntu on a stick and try it out! So I did and it seems like a solution.
But what I need is a take-me-by-the-hand-and-lead-me course/tutorial that builds on my ancient knowledge of DOS and ends up with me being able to administer our home network.
My internet searches reveal LOTS of articles, videos, etc. but they often go too deep, too fast (“Now that we’ve learned how to copy a file, let’s change the entire Bash interface.”) or stop far short of what is necessary (“Now that we can copy files and rename directories, experiment away!”)
So, from your personal experience, may I gather some recommendations? I need enough understanding to be able to feel comfortable going from a dual-boot computer to just the Linux boot. (Although I’ll probably always keep at least one with programs that I can’t replace.)
Thank you.
If you’ve been using MS-Windows without needing the command prompt, you can avoid the command line in Linux for the most part.
You have all the standard GUI stuff: Web browser, file manager, media players, LibreOffice, etc.
What do you mean by managing your home network? To access the router, you use the web browser as usual. Are you setting up a Samba server or anything?
For some programs, and even the OS at times, there are configuration files that might need to be tweaked. While I’ve been using Vi/Vim for mumble years, the Nano editor is simpler for beginners. (We really need Notepad++ ported to Linux without needing Wine.)
Note that a good way to start off is to set up a virtual machine running Linux. You can toy around with it here and there and go back to your main OS without rebooting. The experience of setting up a VM will have some similarities to learning Linux.
The answer is a Chromebook.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Linux, just not for desktops. The versatility and control in a Linux box are too much for “normal” users. You’d need to lock it down to just a browser and LibreOffice —> You can buy that off the shelf: a Chromebook.
To the OP:
There are plenty of walkthroughs telling you how to make a bootable thumbdrive with the distro of your choice. you can even testdrive a lot of distros online on “DistroTest”.
**ftq
**Ah, but the command line is what I need to do the “maintenance things.” Add printers, re-format partitions, troubleshoot the IP stack when something goes wrong when the IFTTT cludge stops cludgeifying. My wife will be the user who only sees the GUI and uses a browser and Libre.
**The Librarian
**See above. A Chromebook would work for her, but I can’t give up the very control you speak of. Too many years doing it all myself and, if necessary being able to go into command prompts to get things the way I want.
And I’ve already got the bootable thumb drive. It’s what I used to show her it won’t be so bad when I pull the plug.
I also wish to forestall suggestions about a community college class. Besides finding nothing offered I would run into a time problem in that I don’t seem to have any!
It’s just that I’ve found that people can get quite comfortable with their own workflow, and any change can be unwelcome eg moving from Office to LibreOffice is not without issues, ime.
Why exactly do you want to do those things on the command line instead of through the GUI? Is there a certain skill set you want to learn or just general network setup? I mean, if you can already administer a Windows network and understand TCP/IP, Linux is similar enough that it should just be a matter of learning the right commands/programs/syntax. Setting up your printer will be much easier through the GUI than through the command line. Same with partitions. It’s like Windows… when you have diskmgmt.msc, you only rarely have to use diskpart.exe. Not sure what IFTTT has to do with your home computer; are you running some sort of server/listener at home?
I’m not sure how comfortable you already are on the command line (do you use Powershell much? Or does “DOS” to you mean dir/copy/del, etc.?)
But, at a high level, it might be helpful to note the following…
[ul]
[li]Linux isn’t a monolithic thing the way Windows or OSX are. Linux describes a “family” of related distributions running on top of the Linux kernel, but each distro has its own set of tools, its own GUI, and its own idiosyncrasies. The commands you learn on one may or may not translate to another distro (but there are probably similar ones).[/li][li]But a lot of Windows concepts still transfer over just fine: you have your root user (admin in Windowese) or sudo (runas in Windows), home directories, system files that you should not touch, the mostly-adequate GUI, the idea that the plain OS only comes with basic tools and you’ll have to download more apps for other stuff…[/li][li]One big difference is that in the Windows world, most programs are distributed as binaries (.exe files) that you download from the web or from the Microsoft Store (does anyone use that?). In Linux, the preferred method to download new command-line software is by using “package managers” that handle dependencies and updates for you. Think “Windows Update” but for programs from ALL companies, not just the operating system vendor. Each distro will have its own package manager, but the common ones are “apt-get” and “yum”.[/li]
Rarely, you might have to compile a program from source code, something you pretty much never have to do in Windows unless you’re a programmer. But that’s pretty rare. As a sysadmin, most of the tools you’ll need should be available via a package manager, especially if you’re running the latest Ubuntu or another similarly popular distro.
[li]The Linux command line is also not a monolith. Most distros will include bash, the most common shell/terminal/command-line alongside a bunch of other common tools, such as the package managers above, a variety of text editors (nano/pico would be most like MSDOS’s edit.com), zipping utilities, network tools (whois, etc.). Whatever you don’t need you can easily get from the package manager.[/li][li]An idiosyncrasy in Linux is that EVERYTHING is represented as a file. In Windows, you have the file system, but you also have network sockets, the Registry, etc. It’s kinda a mindfuck, but the advantage is that the same command line tools lets you peek into just about everything… network traffic, CPU info, random numbers, blah blah. If you know what a “pipe” (|) and regular expressions (grep) are, these are two ways the Linux command line can be much much more powerful than Windows’ cmd.exe (although I understand Powershell is much better; just never bothered to learn it).[/li][li]A lot of administrative tasks is about understanding the connections and interactions between systems and devices, not necessarily memorizing commands and syntax (that’s what reference guides are for). If you set up a network in a sane way, it’s quite possible to do it in an OS-agnostic fashion. These days Macs, Linux, Windows machines and printers and smart home devices and gaming consoles and the such can all get along quite well, usually speaking some variation of HTTP, SSH, DLNA, SMB, or similarly common protocol, all usually resting on top a mostly intercompatible TCP/IP and DNS stack.[/li][li]Last but not least, IMHO the best *NIX-like system is not Linux but OSX. If you can afford a Mac, it can also run bash, and homebrew rivals the packages available on Ubuntu. It also has a much nicer GUI than any Linux distro. For that matter, Windows can now run its own Linux subsystem and you can run bash and GNU utils right from Windows without having to launch a VM. Personally, I find this too confusing for daily use and just run my Linux in the cloud, but that option exists if you just want to familiarize yourself with bash and command line tools without wanting to bother with the Ubuntu GUI. (As a web dev/sysadmin, I’ve used Ubuntu for the last few years without the GUI installed… it’s standard in web hosts.)[/li][/ul]
Anything in particular you want to learn? There’s really no limit to what you can learn, but the basic stuff just takes a few hours of tutorials.
If you’re fine with the command line, then you should be fine. The main things to note are:
Only ever install stuff through the Package Manager (it’s like the App Store, except that it existed before there was such a thing as an App Store). If you start downloading .pkg and .rpm files, you’re almost certainly going to bone things.
Get everything set up and configured before you start doing anything else. Get your network going, your printer going, your dual monitors, your funky keyboard, your graphics card, or whatever it might be. There’s a high chance that you’ll completely bork the system trying to get this all set up and have to wipe and start again. So, until you have literally everything working, expect to have to perform a wipe.
A possible third would depend on whether you actually want to go ahead with Ubuntu if this is primarily for your wife and not for yourself. If she’s barely even comfortable with Windows then, even if you could trust that Ubuntu would stay as Windows-level friendly as it can be without fail (which is relatively unlikely), it’s probably not your best option. I would set her up with something more stripped back and similar to Android. Point in fact, you could just install Android.
If you want to do Ubuntu, then the third recommendation would be to consider getting Xubuntu or Lubuntu. The new Gnome 3 interface is basically locked down and can’t be changed very much. If you get Xubuntu then you can go through and delete basically every single UI element on the dashboard and start bar except the browser, the office tools, the terminal launcher, and the package manager. That’s probably all that she’ll ever want and she’ll never mind having everything else that she’ll never actually use hidden away; it will just make it easier for her to learn because there won’t be 4 dozen extraneous applications pre-installed and all forms of system setting applications.
But, as said, you might want to consider letting someone else figure out how to strip things down and make them easy for her. You can still always launch the terminal and fiddle with things under the hood, but the experience will be somewhere between Android and Windows instead of (with Ubuntu) being weird-Windows with a side helping of DOS:
I haven’t completely given up on Windows or MacOS, but I use Linux a lot more than I used to (mostly in a VM).
One resource I like and can recommend is a book called " How Linux Works" by No Starch Press. In my opinion, it pitches the advice at the right level - enough detail, but not insanely technical. It’s very command-line focussed, as well.
I tried Unix, but really could not get used to it. Two problems though were the deal breakers. First was the fact that the editor I have been using for 35 years is Windows only (of course 35 years ago it was DOS only) and really didn’t run under wine. The second is the inability to write a global set command. I mostly work from a command line and have a bunch of single letter batch files that will load (or compile or view) a given file name but if none is given will look for the setting of the variable dfile for the name. This is absolutely impossible under Unix, according to more than one expert, because, while you can set a variable, it goes away when the batch file exits.
You want to manage your network on Linux? Time to man ip. Man pages are your friend.
You ought to be able to do that under Linux with shell scripts, obviously not quite the same as batch files. You can export the variable, out pass it to another command as an argument.
I need to run some stuff under “real” Linux (I usually use Cygwin) and since I’ve been setting up some VMs decided to do a VM on my Windows 10 box. To see what’s what with Ubuntu, went with that.
The install and such went smoothly. But let me tell you, the user interface and more just plain sucks. E.g., the side scroll bars are nuts. You have to carefully hover on the edge, wait till the little scroll symbol pops up, and then … grrr. It just doesn’t work well. So I need to quickly scroll down a bunch. The scroll symbol stops at the bottom of the window. But I’m only 1/4 thru the page! It’s still loading the rest of the page. (The VM may be part of the slowness, but the symbol should not be moving like this!)
And on and on.
Next up, going to try Mint. But I suspect for this task I may as well just boot up a Pi.
What? I use Kubuntu, and I can’t figure out what you’re talking about. Individual windows have side scroll bars, yes, but they are exactly like in Windows (the OS). And they’re not needed anyway, because the mouse wheel can do all the scrolling (just like in Windows).
The export command sets system variables for the length of your terminal session but you can always configure it as part of the bootup or session start sequence, so it’s always there for you.
I don’t know what you read that gave you the impression otherwise.
Maybe there’s some chance that Gnome was rewritten for 3.x but the thing ran like a pig from the time I first started working on Linux in the early 2000s and that takes some pretty bad coding to accomplish when you’re talking 15 years past the introduction of windowed desktops. So, even though it does seem to finally function responsively, I feel like that might simply be a factor that the hardware finally got good enough, but that would still mean that it’s running horrible code under the hood.
I’ve run my desktop on Ubuntu for a while now and swapped my wife’s laptop last year to Mint. I’ve had to rely quite heavily on the user community forums over the years as well as the tutorials atlinux.org. I dispensed with the dual boot the first 3 months in and haven’t looked back.
I appreciate all the advice so far and will at least look at Mint, too.
But if you read this page pretending you’re brand new to this OS, you might get a feel for where I start to get lost.
Not critcizing anybody (far from it!) but we went from discussion about dual booting to suddenly having virtual machines and a Package Manager, grep,etc., which is what I’m trying to get a handle on. As far as Linux, I’ve got the basics of terminal. Where is the document/video/what-have-you that says “NEXT up, how to…”?
And that’s what I’m looking for: Something–an ordered something–to learning the right things.
BTW, Reply, the Lynda course idea may be what I’m looking for, hadn’t thought of that but will look into it.
Again, thanks, all. I truly appreciate your time and help.