Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there’s more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.

In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.

And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.

This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.

So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there’s more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON’T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!

shoutouts to tux

  • OR3X@lemmy.world
    50·
    26 days ago

    Around 2006 I watched a video on YouTube of a guy showing off Pendrive Linux booting from a USB drive and it blew my mind that you could run an entire OS from a lowly USB drive. I then made my own and used it to play games on the computers at my middle school and have been unfortunately addicted to Linux ever since. Later on in my 20s I took a Linux class in college and my professor was really impressed I already knew so much about Linux. 8 years of “brute forcing it” taught me quite a bit. Now I’m a jaded network administrator and have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

    • LeftReddit2@lemmy.worldOP
      19·
      26 days ago

      When I was younger, I actually liked it when my computer broke because I thought fixing it was giving me knowledge. I guess it did to some extent, but I’d rather my stuff just work now that I’m older.

    • Ertain@feddit.onlineEnglish
      5·
      26 days ago

      That’s neat. When I was in college I would carry a live USB thumb drive and would sometimes play games off of it, too, in the computer room of the business building. Also, I use Mint, too, since it works well for me.

    • forbiddencherry@lemmy.today
      2·
      26 days ago

      Back in the day tomsrtbt was similarly inspiring. It could boot from a single 3½" floppy. Always kept one around as a rescue disk.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    26 days ago

    For real. Some guy I knew introduced me to SuSE back when I was in highschool. It was great and all, but it made things easy by hiding details behind snappy GUIs. While I was in college, I started to realize I wasn’t learning anything about Linux. So I took a deep breath and installed Gentoo. Switched to Arch for a while, but I’m back to Gentoo now. I wanted to learn more about how Linux really worked and holy shit did I get my wish.

    • LeftReddit2@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      26 days ago

      Ain’t no way I will ever try Gentoo. I don’t even know what “compiling from source” means or what the difference between that an “binaries” are.

      You know, it is shocking I work IT when I barely understand tech at all. Though to be fair I am a help desk guy. I have Google IT Support, ITIL 4 Foundation, CCNA, and Security+ so I know some stuff. Kind of. A bit.

      I should just take that Linux+ class shouldn’t I?

      • Axolotl@feddit.it
        6·
        26 days ago

        I don’t even know what “compiling from source” means or what the difference between that an “binaries” are.

        To make it simple:

        “Source code” is readable human code which is a set of instructions you give to the computer, think of it like a tutorial the computer reads to do stuff

        “compiling from source” is that act of making human readable code in to computer readable code, computers can only understand machine code, luckly compiling is automatic these days

        “Binaries” are packages which contain all the compiled code ex: .exe or .bin files

      • Ajikeshi@lemmy.world
        2·
        26 days ago

        you could always go for LPIC, the books/courses tend to be quite cheap and the exams usually are cheap as well

        LPIC will provide you with a stable foundation that you can venture out from on your own

  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
    131·
    26 days ago

    I recently had to restore a backup after a btrfs partition failed and became permanently read-only, and just for fun I tried to restore the backup of the broken partition to working order and read through tons of forums and spoke on the #btrfs libera chat with the experts and at the end of it this is my advice:

    Do not use btrfs, use ext4 instead. btrfs failures are unrecoverable and they don’t care.

    • Peffse@lemmy.world
      6·
      26 days ago

      I ran a software RAID5 via LVM2 and when a failure occurs it becomes some voodoo magic that not even the maintainers understand.

      Lost 6TB of archives.

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        3·
        26 days ago

        Guess you learned, but the rules of backup are 3-2-1 with at least one offline (I count offline HDD as a different media type for 2, tape one day, maybe, seems painful), it’s not a real backup until you’ve restored from it and, RAID is not a backup.

        • Peffse@lemmy.world
          2·
          26 days ago

          It was just my media rips. So to say it was “lost” is a bit dramatic I suppose. I just had to spend another two weeks re-ripping my DVD and Blu-ray collection to restore the lost archives. (Without the RAID this time lol)

    • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
      11·
      26 days ago

      Sounds like bs, maybe your specific problem was unrecoverable, in general they are.

  • WFH@lemmy.zip
    12·
    26 days ago

    Rawdogging gang represent!

    I started in the late 90’s with a Mandrake CD from a magazine. No internet meant nothing more than “this is interesting but I can’t do anything with yet”.

    Then in school we were given a PC, an internet connection and we burned a Debian 3 CD. I became expert at reinstalling it because at the time it was the “simplest” way to unfuck what I fucked up.

    Then I just winged it at work and learned a lot.

    Then I just moved every system at home to Linux. Never looked back.

    Sometimes I feel I still know nothing. But then, when asked to do any administrative task on Winslop/macOS that I know can do in a few seconds on Linux, I feel so hapless and inefficient that I feel it must amount to something.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
      2·
      26 days ago

      The fact that Linux is so easily reinstalled has really been a hinder in my journey towards learning to actually fix the problems that would prompt a reinstall.

      Over decades I have come to love the dark crypt of arcane spells that is GRUB rescue env.

  • LostWanderer@fedia.io
    8·
    26 days ago

    LOL Rawdogging Linux is INSANE; I did it through a bit of a cycle of reading, using my system, learning more. I still broke my systems but the fun part: I had a second HDD so all of my important bits were safe typically. I distro-hopped for years, mostly moving between openSUSE (older version and Tumbleweed), Ubuntu (started when it was 16.04), Fedora, Mint, Debian, Bazzite, Aurora, tried Artix briefly (the community is lacking). Finally settled on Garuda Linux, btw! Found something that suits my needs and I have enough knowledge that I haven’t broken my system once…Heh, good times!

  • mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world
    7·
    26 days ago

    not only i rawdogged linux, i used a rolling distro with a lot of questionable security decisions (eherm… Manjaro) during grad school.

    … no idea how that laptop survived grad school but it did…

  • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
    7·
    26 days ago

    It warms my heart that after your journey you realized there is still so much more to learn.

    Many would leave it there and call themselves an expert

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6·
    26 days ago

    Linux almost needs continuing education courses. New shit comes out, and if you don’t try it in the next 5-7 years, you’ll end up getting it anyway.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    6·
    26 days ago

    I had a somewhat similar introduction. My Windows XP ran into a blue screen on boot and I couldn’t afford tech support or a Windows CD to reinstall. This was well before I knew how to pirate software.

    So one of the ladies in tech support at my high school recommended I try Ubuntu. I think it was version 8 at the time and had a really charming boot sound.

    I was instantly hooked when I came across the GTK/Emerald theming options because I was big into RocketDock at the time but again couldn’t afford to buy it. When I found out you could customize everything all the way to the boot menu without hacking it, I spent the next six months learning the whole system to build it into a fully custom personal theme from boot to desktop.

    It took until Proton hit its stride before I could finally daily it but I almost always had it available in the side on at least one or two of my computers.

    • Doom@lemmy.world
      3·
      26 days ago

      You can use it without learning additional skills, but to truly know what’s going on with any operating system that requires higher knowledge. I’m including windows, mac, android, linux, etc in this. If we could fully understand technology by touching it tech support wouldn’t need to exist. Nor would the insane number of overpriced certifications.

    • InnerScientist@lemmy.world
      2·
      26 days ago

      …So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?

      I’ve had windows classes in school, I’ve later learned how to configure Windows and Linux servers. Windows starts simple and isn’t easy to customize away from the default configuration. Linux starts difficult but doesn’t grow as quick in complexity. Both shouldn’t be configured that far by most users though and the basic usage of both has similar complexity.

      Why do you think an operating system shouldn’t have classes? From what I’m hearing around the workplace(though thats biased) more people should have basic computer knowledge and they even get training time allocated for in-house training courses.

      • 5318008@lemmy.ml
        2·
        26 days ago

        You shouldn’t have to take a class for an operating system…

        …So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?

        Invalid inference.

      • Felis_Catus_Domesticus@lemmy.world
        21·
        26 days ago

        Basic computer knowledge is the answer here. Concepts in OS’es and software are reused over and over and are common to most vendors/platforms. Partitions/Partitioning… etc. All basic knowledge. The fine details don’t make sense without it.

      • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
        11·
        26 days ago

        If you want to take a class on a system to get into the stuff under the hood, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t have to take a class for like, basic operations. Saying “this starts difficult and stays that way” isn’t a good selling point for people to use your system.

        • InnerScientist@lemmy.world
          1·
          26 days ago

          Saying “this starts difficult and stays that way” isn’t a good selling point for people to use your system.

          Both shouldn’t be configured that far by most users though and the basic usage of both has similar complexity.

          Edit: To be honest the actual difficulty of a system also depends on what you do with it. Windows at work and Linux at work both require only a basic understanding of how to use the OS to use effectively. Basic usage and restarting it if something isn’t working correctly. At home you’re more involved with actually installing the software that you use, the system settings and Updates/when they happen. Linux makes installing software safer due to the repos preventing the easy virus downloads and windows makes drivers for some windows only hardware work without complex setup. Assuming we’re buying a PC that ships with Linux drivers will work though that’s what I assume your average person using Linux would use (as in the average person uses a PC with the OS it is shipped with).