For my work machine, where it wasn’t really necessary to have good sound, graphics, printing, or DVD-burning, it worked great. Best software dev machine I ever had. I don’t understand why Mac has become the de-facto development standard instead of Linux. (Well, I do, I just think they’re bad reasons.) Such a bad practice to compile and test stuff on Mac that’s destined to run on Linux anyway.
For my home machine, Linux never quite worked out. Everything was a struggle. Especially the peripherals… I want the peripherals… the sound, graphics, media burning, printing, to just… work, and work with the quality settings the hardware is capable of. So Linux was unsatisfactory, and I had grown to hate Windows, so I switched to Mac and didn’t look back.
I will make one suggestion though… if you make your wife switch from MS to LibreOffice, it will all end in tears. Google Docs are pretty full-featured now. The more stuff you can do in the browser, the more likely your switch is to succeed.
TLDR, give Lynda a chance. I loved a lot of their other courses, and they helped me professionally a ton. Also, if you prefer reading, this site looks good: https://linuxjourney.com/
Longer: Linux is vast. It’s a hodgepodge of utilities and interfaces clobbered together by thousands of people over decades, with no one central authority in control, unlike Microsoft or Apple. That makes it harder to learn systematically because there’s not any one “thing” to learn, much less one curriculum.
Do you have a certain end goal in mind, some skill set you’d like to have eventually, or some service or product that you want to make? IT is so hyperspecialized these days that there are infinite years you can spend learning about any one particular niche. But by all means, download away and play with everything… if you break something, just restore from a backup or start over :)*
*I should note that I almost burnt down my aunt’s house once by installing an early version of Ubuntu. Left it installing, went out for lunch, when we came back the laptop was on fire and and the glass table had melted. Apparently that early version didn’t have the fan drivers yet and so the laptop just overheated until it melted, heh. So… maybe just keep one eye on it at first
The problem is that there really isn’t an order. The order depends on you, on your use cases, on your hardware, in your environment.
The steps folks are telling you are generic steps for how to be successful at whatever other steps you choose. The package manager IS part of the nuts and bolts. Virtual machines ARE a good way to try out small things without trashing your base install and spending a day trying to redo everything while your wife is breathing down your neck to just make the goddamn thing work like Windows did. That’s no way to live.
Mac OS is/was closer to BSD flavour (cf Trident (aka PC-BSD) if you wanna try it) than Linux, or am I misremembering?
Anyway, not sure what your needs are exactly but take a spare laptop and install one of these free operating systems on it. To install software beyond the base system, one of the menus will have a “Software centre” or “App store” or whatever the distribution chose to call it; you don’t need to open up any terminal windows for that.
This is true, but just for purposes of navigating/managing the system from a command prompt, it’s safe to say that it’s abundantly Unix-like or whatever terminology you wish to use. It’s rare that I need to care whether Mac has the exact version of awk or grep I’m accustomed to. Except interestingly, Mac is leaping forward to zsh as the default shell. I’ve been meaning to make the switch forever, so I guess this is good incentive.
Yeah, for the purposes of the OP, the difference between OSX, BSD, and Linux shouldn’t matter. It’s just *nix. The workflow, toolsets, and syntax are quite similar between them.
Several Unix experts agreed that that was impossible. Once the shell script exited the variable went away and that was that. I found the man pages very hard to understand. I learn by example, not formal rules.
You’re trying to find something easy to use at the same time as complaining that you’ve immediately become completely lost trying to use the damn thing.
To be sure, learning it is one solution. But that will be not just you, it will be both you and your wife. She’ll have to deal with this frustration as well - even if it’s just her watching you do stuff every time she has a problem.
Why not just find something easy to use? Are you aware of a downside? This is all stuff that’s free and that you can plug in via a thumb drive and try out as well.
What, what? Windows doesn’t persist variables outside of shell scripts either. And there are a million ways to make Linux achieve that same behavior. It shouldn’t be hard, but then I’m not entirely sure I get your use case.
I’m gonna give your experts the benefit of the doubt and suggest maybe they gave a faulty response to a faulty question. If you want to put a bit more detail into your use case, I’d be glad to give it a go.
Many of your Windows programs may be able to run under Linux via a program called Wine. Some run just as well as they do under Windows, and some run so terribly as to be unusable; it depends on the program.
Ubuntu is certainly a good one to try out for the first time. If your computer is more than a few years old, however, I would recommend a fork of Ubuntu called Xubuntu. The operating system is identical under the hood. The only difference is that the default GUI is less resource intense.
The primary difference between Linux distributions is how they manage software. Whichever distribution you try out, learn how to work the package management system. Ubuntu’s is called “apt”. Last I used Ubuntu, there was a GUI point-and-click interface for the software repositories as well, but I would strongly suggest taking the time to learn how to use the program from the command line as well, as well as some of the other basics of using the command line. If you’re familiar with Windows’ command line, you’ll be able to pick it up fairly easily, but there are a number of notable differences.
Also, there are no drive letters in Linux. Everything falls under the root directory “/”. Partitions, CD-ROMs, USB sticks, floppy disks, etc, are all “mounted” to a directory under that root folder. Ubuntu handles most of that stuff automatically, iirc, but in a lot of other Linuxes, you would need to enter a command to mount and unmount those devices in order to use them. If you need to access your Windows drive, you may need to mount it manually, and may need to install utilities for dealing with NTFS partitions in order to do so, although in this day and age, Ubuntu might have that enabled by default; it’s been a while since I last used it.
Much of what you use on a daily basis will probably look very similar. Mozilla Firefox, for example, is not much different under Linux. A lot of programs have their “options” or “preferences” under the Edit menu, which is not where you would normally find them under Windows, so keep that in mind as well if you need to change a setting in a program. I’ve often found that files download faster under Linux than they do under Windows. I think it’s because Linux has less background traffic taking up bandwidth.
If you REALLY want to delve into the nuts and bolts of Linux, with less handholding along the way, then you can try distributions like Gentoo or Arch. They have their own handbooks, which are worth reading if you want to learn more about Linux administration, even if you don’t want to use their particular distributions. I would strongly recommend you familiarize yourself with an “easier” Linux before attempting either of these two.
Also, are LUG’s (Linux User Groups) still a thing anymore? Way back when, there was one that set up shop every so often at a local community college. They used to help people learn all of the steps to installing and administering a Linux system. You may want to check and see if there is one in your area.
For my VM I next tried Linux Mint. It clearly wasn’t going to work due to stupid install issues.
So I skipped to standard Debian. I downloaded the single CD iso since I want a smallish install and avoided installing a lot of stuff.
But GRUB. “Good” old GRUB. Yep. Screwed up again. So I had to do a rescue thing. Jeesh. How bad is a boot program when it’s actually worse than LILO???
Now this seems to look and work mostly like I expect. It could match the OP’s needs well.
But this is sort of educational and I think I’m going to try other distros here and there to get a better idea of the current landscape.
To those that suggest some prefix-Ubuntu. This is a problem with the field. Too many variants to know which ones are going to have the support, now and in the future, to invest in them. Just trying to determine which ones have a suitable package manager and a bunch of other things is getting too hard.
And sometimes at night, when the Moon is low in the western sky, I’ll be nostalgic for Yggdrasil. Say it with me … Yggdrasil.
Well… yes and no. Yes, things are in a constant change of flux. No, it isn’t totally impossible to assess the trajectory of the tech.
Take for example Xubuntu and reason out what it actually is - Ubuntu (a very widely used and loved distro), ripping out Unity (a mocked and reviled user interface), replacing the UI with Xfce (created in 1996 and still well-regarded as a dirt-simple and performant UI. And Xubuntu itself has been out there for 10 years.
So Xubuntu isn’t going anywhere, at least not suddenly. But what if it did? Worst case, you have to go back to stock Ubuntu and learn a UI. In my personal experience, UI knowledge is the least valuable part of Linux and the part that I invest least in. People can’t seem to resist tinkering with it, so every couple of years I would be learning a different way to GUI into the filesystem or system settings or launch buttons. So I make a point not to rely on the GUI for anything but the bare minimum, or that I just can’t conceptualize without pictures (gparted for one).
As far as package managers go, this is pretty much solved. You need one. Every distro labeled “user friendly” already has one. Learn what it is, and how to use it.
The end.
Honestly I wouldn’t have framed a package manager comment as “decide which package manager you need.” I would frame it as “your package manager is your best friend. You will use it frequently. Learn its name, learn how to find packages, learn how to install them.”
I know this is frustrating for noobs. I have been there. But people have got to understand the power of “this is your car. it uses gas. this is what a gas station is.” as opposed to “turn the key in the switch. press the gas pedal. turn the steering wheel right 2 times, then left 1 time, and now you can buy beer”. These are technically true instructions, but they stop being helpful if your car is electric, or it’s parked somewhere else, or you aren’t 21. It’s a matter of learning to see the whole problem and breaking it down into parts to solve.
This post inspired me to do something similar. I’ve used Ubuntu in the past, so went with Debian just to see how easy it was to set up. Pretty straightforward, but the bundled software is absolute gash, and I’m never going to use it anyway, so binned it.
Being very bored, I had a stab at freeBSD. Well, I got it running, but sticking a GUI on top of it has proven to be a bit of a challenge. Fun though!
I am agreeing with what several people said: most users don’t care about the kernel, command line, etc., so it all comes down to how it’s packaged. Assuming one doesn’t pick a crappy distribution or GUI, nothing should be particularly less intuitive than starting to use Windows or Mac OS. A click is a click.
Use the Trident link I posted before. Otherwise, IIRC on base freeBSD, you have to “pkg install xorg” and install whatever window manager you want. Or, better yet, “pkg install plasma5-plasma-desktop” and follow the post-install directions (to enable /proc and also to start the GUI after the operating system boots).
One thing FreeBSD has always had is excellent documentation (“man pages”). Though that may be interesting only to hackers and power users.
Exactly. Once I get my foot in the door, things will work out. I’m not unintelligent and I have experience with computers and programming languages that goes back farther than I like to remember. I currently do all the “under the hood” things on our stable of Windows machines and I do quite well at them most of the time. I have a career in software validation and make an annoyance of myself with people who design GUIs for a living. I can learn the differences the same way I can accept (although I disagree) with replacing DIR with LS.
Yes. Yes you can.
Not exactly. I want something easy for her to use and she’s satisfied with the Ubuntu GUI. Her needs for an Office equivalent are limited to letter writing. I am the one with a boatload of spreadsheets that will probably end up in Google Docs if I don’t like Libre office. A working browser (and Firefox is even pre-installed in the distro I’ve been playing with) will allow her to do banking, emailing and library-ing and such so she’s good to go.
But I like to tinker with the stuff. I remember how much joy it evoked when I first discovered that the NET USER command would allow me to fix the logon problem that came from out of nowhere (and remains unexplained but fixed to this day.)
My complaint–and I would tender that it isn’t a complaint at all but a request–is to find the roadmap that most-efficiently leads me through the learning process.
I thought that’s what I was doing with Ubuntu?
Heck, I’m not sure how to pronounce “Ubuntu.”
**@Slash1972 **Ok, my reply above was smart-ass. The real reason is that I am pleased with Win7 and not so much with Win10. As you know, support for that is nearing termination very soon and I need something to fall back to. Finances, while not critical, really don’t support buying new machines (Apple or PC) and, besides, all our current machines are still working fine for what we need them to do.
I am probably going to regret asking this, but what is this disagreement and what is the reasoning behind it?
If you prefer to use dir over ls then that’s understandable. The options work slightly differently. Maybe some of them are more convenient than others. The unfamiliar is always uncomfortable for a while.
If you judge dir as being superior to something you haven’t bothered learning, then that’s just ignorance.
If you disagree that Unix should have different commands from Windows/DOS, knowing that both Unix and ls predate DOS/Windows by at least a decade… I’m not sure what to say except have fun arguing with your OS.
No, it’s simple preference. No good reason whatsoever except for the inane belief that whatever I learned first must be the best and only way to do it.
And I don’t so much argue with my OS as much as I yell at it for allowing me to do what I told it to do in the first place.
