How Not to Start with Linux
Do the opposite of everything I did
Today we talk about a special episode of misfortunes I have had in life, we shall talk about Linux.
Some random:
Hold on
Who the hell are you and why are you in my blog?
Some random:
I would just like to interject for a moment. What you are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I have recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the resources of the machine to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
OML GET OUT MAN.
proceeds to get beaten up
No clue who that was and why they spoke in block quotes, oh well, that person is now not alive.
The Actual Content Now
Anyways, as I was saying, I am going to be talking about how NOT to use Linux for the first time. I am basically going to tell you to do the exact opposite of what I did when starting out, which retrospectively is one of the most stupid things I could have done and probably will ever do in my life.
Any sane person would tell you to install a popular, well supported Linux distribution or distro like Ubuntu or Fedora or the plethora of other good options. They would probably tell you to use gnome, in my opinion, the best desktop environment in the market currently. They would also encourage you to explore plugins, use the app store they include, etc. Oh fun fact, the app store first started on Linux, way before android, iOS or any other OS used it at all.
In any case, I did not do any of the above. What I did was use Arch Linux with i3wm. If you do not understand those words, that is completely fine, because then you do not need to care about what they mean. Arch Linux is a Linux distro without special hand holding. You are thrown into a terminal and have to configure it yourself, instead of choosing a couple of options and having it do the install for you. It is not that hard in technicality, but we will come back to that later. i3wm is a tiling window manager which makes my apps come up in neat grids with 0 overlap and automatic resizing. Keyboard shortcuts for the win.
I underwent 3 days of pain when I decided to watch a video on dual booting arch Linux with macOS instead of following the almighty book, the Arch Wiki. Within 30 minutes of following the Arch Wiki, guess who had a functional Linux distro running. Well not me because I forgot to install the bootloader and had to speedrun the install again.
After that, it was time to make my second bad decision. i3wm. It is a completely different experience from the regular macOS or windows desktop. There are no pretty buttons to do anything, its keyboard shortcuts. After having gotten used to that life though, even on windows I do use keyboard shortcuts as much as I can. It just makes work much faster. I spent 2 weeks customizing it with this as an end product:
Two years later, and a bunch of experience with Linux under my belt, this is what my latest rice looked like:
If you want a link to it, here is the rice.
So remember kids, do as I say and not as I do, and I say install fedora. Oh right, one last thing. (slight tangent, One Last Kiss is one of the best songs.) If you do not want to try Linux on bare metal first, you can run virtual machines using something like VMWare or have a full Linux terminal integrated with Windows using WSL.
I will probably write blog posts talking a bit about both WSL and Ricing in the future, as both of them are their own can of worms.
To sign off, I use arch btw