Serious question. I’m planning on switching from windows to some distro, but it will be the first time I’m daily driving Linux. Are there any solid beginner-friendly resources for getting started? I’m familiar with simple bash commands, but that’s about it
be confused by all the options in the installation process, look up every unknown word, try to do everything manualy, fail
start installation process again, choose all the defaults, works!
trying to install a programm with terminal, fail because not in sudo list, look up how to get into sudo list
update in terminal doesn’t work, have to remove some lines in /etc/apt/sources.list - look up how to use the text editor nano, look many yt-videos about Linux filesystem (what to those folders mean? Everything is a file?)
try to resize a partition (can’t remember which), can’t, because I didn’t choose LVM in installation process - install Debian again, and do all the steps above again
I think I had to reinstall Debian 5 more times after that, just because I didn’t know what I was doing and it was an easy reset for me.
Very frustraiting at times, and a very rewarding feeling when something worked. Made me love tech again, 10/10 would do again.
Also, get the updated kernel out of the backports repo as the main repo is pretty far behind in my opinion. I needed 6.5+ to get the hardware compatibility for some stuff and then I more or less had an out of box experience. I also highly recommend having your /home on a separate partition or drive. This way you can keep your user files if you ever want to change or reinstall the OS.
Don’t feel bad about messing up the install. Everyone fucks it up a few times. The best one I did was forget to make the user account AND did not set a root password. Thou shall not install things at 2am…
Try installing something like Linux Mint that is Ubuntu or Debian based which has a lot of beginner documentation. You don’t really need much resources after that, you will probably learn while using it and searching for how to do things. Also if you play games, check if the games you play work in Linux via ProtonDB.
As someone who recently did a switch to get used to Linux, if you’re planning on gaming then Nobara is supposedly the beginner friendly gaming distro. I switched to Nobara and my only issue was screen flickering that I fixed by switching from Wayland to X11 (that was as simple a choosing the other option on the login screen). Everything else just works and KDE looks similar to the windows layout so it doesn’t feel too unintuitive either.
My two gripes that I can’t do anything about are the lack of HDR support (supposedly that’s finally in the works) and no Linux support for some online games (The Finals in my case, but maybe if Linux numbers go up they’ll finally flip the switch), neither could be solved by having a different distro.
If you just want to game and want it up and running without tinkering too much I recommend Nobara.
Raspberry pi os was built for education, it’s a fork of debain and can run on computers that aren’t raspberry pis. They also have a digital bookshelf with many ebooks that can also be downloaded without the OS as they’ve been released as creative commons.
Serious question. I’m planning on switching from windows to some distro, but it will be the first time I’m daily driving Linux. Are there any solid beginner-friendly resources for getting started? I’m familiar with simple bash commands, but that’s about it
Don’t be scared away from the arch wiki regardless of the distro you choose, or has a ton of great info that’s not just for arch.
For me worked:
I think I had to reinstall Debian 5 more times after that, just because I didn’t know what I was doing and it was an easy reset for me.
Very frustraiting at times, and a very rewarding feeling when something worked. Made me love tech again, 10/10 would do again.
Really threw yourself into the deep end there, nice. Hashtags team debian.
Also, get the updated kernel out of the backports repo as the main repo is pretty far behind in my opinion. I needed 6.5+ to get the hardware compatibility for some stuff and then I more or less had an out of box experience. I also highly recommend having your /home on a separate partition or drive. This way you can keep your user files if you ever want to change or reinstall the OS.
Don’t feel bad about messing up the install. Everyone fucks it up a few times. The best one I did was forget to make the user account AND did not set a root password. Thou shall not install things at 2am…
Try installing something like Linux Mint that is Ubuntu or Debian based which has a lot of beginner documentation. You don’t really need much resources after that, you will probably learn while using it and searching for how to do things. Also if you play games, check if the games you play work in Linux via ProtonDB.
I’ve heard a lot of talk in the linux community about linux mint being a good beginner distro.
As someone who recently did a switch to get used to Linux, if you’re planning on gaming then Nobara is supposedly the beginner friendly gaming distro. I switched to Nobara and my only issue was screen flickering that I fixed by switching from Wayland to X11 (that was as simple a choosing the other option on the login screen). Everything else just works and KDE looks similar to the windows layout so it doesn’t feel too unintuitive either.
My two gripes that I can’t do anything about are the lack of HDR support (supposedly that’s finally in the works) and no Linux support for some online games (The Finals in my case, but maybe if Linux numbers go up they’ll finally flip the switch), neither could be solved by having a different distro.
If you just want to game and want it up and running without tinkering too much I recommend Nobara.
Raspberry pi os was built for education, it’s a fork of debain and can run on computers that aren’t raspberry pis. They also have a digital bookshelf with many ebooks that can also be downloaded without the OS as they’ve been released as creative commons.