this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
60 points (98.4% liked)

linuxmemes

32772 readers
512 users here now

Hint: :q!

Sister communities:

Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
  • Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated. This is an LGBTQ+-friendly community -- if that is a problem for you, you should leave.
    • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
  • Don't come looking for advice, this is not the right community.
    • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves / tolerates / hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
    • 5. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ Language/язык/Sprache
  • This is primarily an English-speaking community. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡¦πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
  • Comments written in other languages are allowed.
  • The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
  • Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
    • 6. (NEW!) Regarding public figuresWe all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
  • Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
  • We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
  • Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed.
    • Β 

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.

    founded 3 years ago
    MODERATORS
    zephyr@lemmy.world
    rtxn@lemmy.world
    60
    Wait, there's books and classes on linux? (lemmy.world)
    submitted 1 hour ago by LeftReddit2@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
    12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     

    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

    top 12 comments
    sorted by: hot top controversial new old
    [–] OR3X@lemmy.world 4 points 27 minutes ago (1 children)

    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.world 3 points 25 minutes 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.

    [–] otacon239@lemmy.world 2 points 12 minutes 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.

    [–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 6 points 57 minutes ago* (last edited 56 minutes ago) (1 children)

    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.world 1 points 53 minutes 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?

    [–] schwifty_squanch@lemmy.ml 4 points 54 minutes ago (1 children)

    Books? Surely you mean man pages.

    [–] ladicius@lemmy.world 1 points 10 minutes ago

    Come on, nobody reads man pages. That's pathetic.

    [–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 9 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 3 minutes ago) (1 children)

    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 5 points 18 minutes 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.

    [–] mmmm@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 hour ago

    I feel like most of us who got into linux in that era got to truly know it that way - tinkering with it, breaking things and figuring them out by ourselves. In my particular case we didn't had internet at home until late 2008 so even "simple" things like updating stuff was a real pain in the ass, though the ubuntu cds were salvation.

    [–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    Damn, that's hard mode. I just used web search to figure things out. IDK whether that's still a viable method, though.

    [–] sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 0 points 1 hour ago

    This is satire right? I'm a little confused.