this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Yeah ~~kind of~~ totally agree. Trying to self host without using the terminal would be like trying to drive a car without touching the steering wheel with your hands. It’s possible but dangerous and cumbersome.
Don’t let it scare you. Get something installed to let you build some VMs to play around without worries (Virtualbox, VM Workstation, parallels), and install a distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and start to play. To self host all you really need is learning some basic file manipulation (move,copy,remove), how to edit text files (vi,emacs,nano), and the basic directory structure. That will get you 90% of the way there. When you see things like awk, sed, grep ask an AI to explain it, they are actually useful for that. These sort of commands start getting into advanced things like output redirection and regex which can be EXTREMELY confusing. Heck I have a CS degree, been in IT for almost 30 years, and I’ve been using Linux since the mid 90s and some of that still confuses me. So basically don’t fret if it’s too confusing, you are totally not alone. Play, screw up, try to fix it, curse, read a lot, try again, realize it’s toast, start over. Honestly I think I just described my job 😂