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in reply to It's FOSS

The existence of Desktop Environments. Would have saved me from distro hopping from one flavor to the next. If I would have known better, I'd have stuck with Linux Mint and just installed it with the XFCE Desktop Environment. Oh well. Now I know better and try to inform new users of them before trying other flavors.
in reply to MrGrumpyMonkey

@mrgrumpymonkey This would indeed save people a lot of time when they are out looking for distros...
in reply to It's FOSS

@mrgrumpymonkey
For beginners, I understand that the issue of whether it’s possible to install other desktop environments is important, provided it’s made clear that, as a rule, the distro’s default desktop environment is fine-tuned in a way that’s often difficult to achieve with desktop environments installed by the user.
in reply to It's FOSS

finding a shell you like is important, just because a distro default is tcsh, bash, sh, ksh, etc, doesn't mean you have to stick with it
in reply to It's FOSS

"This is not, in fact, the Year of the Linux Desktop."
in reply to It's FOSS

set -x in a bash script. Before that, I used a lot of echo statements to debug...
in reply to It's FOSS

that people who know more about Linux will joke about disastrous commands you can use, but not tell you they are disastrous commands.
in reply to It's FOSS

distro-hopping is not a bad thing. It's how you find your one true distro.
in reply to It's FOSS

In Bash: Ctrl+R makes you search through your history, making it MUCH easier to repeat commands.
in reply to It's FOSS

Read a book on command line, then use any AI tool however dumb to give you ideas and never believe a word... ask it why, why, why.
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in reply to It's FOSS

Teaching yourself how to install and use Linux in the early 90's was very difficult, and there were few resources available to get answers. Today, many distros are practically a forehead install (smack keyboard with forehead and distro installed).
in reply to It's FOSS

You can take your SSD or HD put it in another computer and it will just work*. (Windows won't and will likely notify you you're using unlicensed software).

*unless radically different eg, different processor type

in reply to It's FOSS

In 2026 ist mit necessary to use the shell as a normal User ♥️.
in reply to It's FOSS

you don't need to use the terminal, but it's nice if you now how to
in reply to It's FOSS

The Terminal is always a better choice than using a GUI.
in reply to It's FOSS

Two things. The man pages are actually good. My experience with GNU/Linux improved tremendously when I learned to integrate man pages into my day to day.

Second, related to the first and generally good "tool" advice. Don't fight Linux. GNU/Linux wants you to use the shell and text centric workflows so lean into it.

in reply to It's FOSS

It is easy to record the audio playing on the computer. I used to manually move cables from the speaker jack to the microphone jack to record audio. Now I can do it easily from the command line with arecord, as shown in the video.

#Linux #LinuxMint #arecord #music #Jesus

in reply to It's FOSS

Use a distro with BTRFS and snapper making automatic snapshots so you can boot into a snapshot and rollback in case something goes wrong. Saved me so much trouble and time.
in reply to It's FOSS

In a terminal shell, if you want to do a recursive operation on dotfiles only, don't do `.*` -- do `.[^.]*` for example, and test with a non-destructive command like `echo` beforehand. Reason: `.*` includes `..`

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