Idk where else to post this but I've finally kicked Windows for good and I'm SO EXCITED

Welcome! Don’t listen to anyone trying to shame you for your distro choice. The most important is that you didn’t choose windows.

No, no! Listen to the shamers! Change your distro eight times over the first month as you listen to them whine, and eventually return to the first one you chose, full of wisdom of why those other distros suck so you can tell the noobs who choose one of them first instead of your glorious choice!
Thanks! I plan to experiment with others, but I wanted a nice smooth transition for my wife and I both, so Mint seemed like a great starting point.
- Mint is rad. I currently use barebones Debian testing with a bunch of customized stuff, but I always keep a bootable Mint flash drive on my keychain. It's a very solid choice
- My boyfriend wanted Linux on his laptop and he's not tech savvy at all. I installed Mint for him and he's very happy with it, no complaints. It's a very good choice.
- I used Mint for almost its entire existence so far, but recently I've started main driving immutables, and gotta say the experience is even more user friendly. That's my current experimentation stage but, so far, it doesn't feel experimental at all, it just works out the box, no issues.
Just as long as it's not Red Star, that's even worse than windows.
- If you have something to hide from The Glorious and Omnipotent Kim Jong Un, our beloved leader, you do not deserve to be a human. All hail our Dear Leader.
  
  M’comrade…
I agree that’s why I don’t listen to all the hater’s who say my distro Choice of Android Tv is bad.
Your distro of choice is a good distro unless you chose anything other than TempleOS
- Thank God, I was afraid you would shame my Hannah Montana Linux

ugh r u rly usin [distro i dont use] just go back to micro$haft luser

You'll probably be making lots of changes to your computer over the next couple of weeks, so it's a good idea to use TimeShift to make system snapshots. (It works like System Restore in Windows). It can even rescue an unbootable system. Just boot from your Linux Live CD / flash drive and you can run TimeShift from that.

Whoah... wish I knew about this when I was setting up my raspberry pi. Got a brand new computer on the way (well half of it is here already) so this might come in handy... thanks!
- FYI, you can usually automate creating timeshifts whenever you add packages or update your system. I did that for mine, so that I don’t have to remember to do it.
Or switch to NixOS 😉

Quick tip: forgot how to use a command? Use man commandname to see a short manual page for that command.

Forgot sudo on your command? !! refers to the previously typed command, so you can simply type sudo !! to fix it.

If you don't know how to use man, just type in man man.
- man man man gives the secrets to the universe
- What I think about every time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Man
  
  (Six Demon Bag is an amazing album btw)
oh wow, thank you for

sudo !!

this is amazing :D
I keep forgetting that one! Thanks! I always use up arrow and then waste time getting the cursor back with maybe the home key or ctrl+ left-arrow LOL
tldr or teeldeer is the short manual. fwiw
- wtf gives the summary, and works for acronyms too.
Also, don't forget manuals have pages lol. I forget how many there are. 99% of the time you just need page 1.

Hey congrats, @[email protected]! By getting through that hurdle you most certainly are that savvy of a person. Enjoy the after success glow and welcome to the hacker universe.

Trial and error is 90% of life! Thats how you get shit done!

you most certainly are that savvy of a person

There are millions of us.

Glad to hear OP has the spare time to make it "it just works"

😂
- Hey everyone that gets over that hurdle implies that its doable and that it might be getting easier.
  
  Remember that use to be just the first hurdle of many. It sounds like kobold is enjoying the desktop already and there use to be another 7 or 8 major hurdles. Audio, video, x11, network, Bluetooth, usb.
  
  Seems like all those were just breezed on past!
That's very kind of you to say, thanks :)
- Im proud you took the plunge! Feel free to reach out if you get stuck on anything. Im a principal engineer whose done work all over the tech stack including the linux kernel and wrote my own shell. (Think gnome/kde user interfaces.) And these days im playing with biochemistry:)

I love how under most Linux threads there is war and anarchie and many know-it-all, but under this? A New Penguin? Lets Embrace him in the best Community there is.

Nice Work Man

Schotts provides a free 'internet edition' .pdf of TLCL, last updated 11/1/2024:

https://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php

Nice!

Tangentially related: So is Automate The Boring Stuff With Python!

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/#toc
Hey thanks
That's pretty awesome, thanks!
The newest version there is 6th edition and has 90 more pages that he latest print copy of 2nd edition. Anyone know if there's a plan to start printing a copy that's less than 10 years old?

Welcome in from the cold. We have blankets and coco.

sed -i -e 's/coco/brew/g' $some_guy_post
- Nah, I drank all of that. I'm having a great time. You get the coco.

Congratulations! It's really fun to learn something new. Don't let anyone distro shame you.

(Unless it's into installing Gentoo)

Does anyone distro shame Mint? The only distro-shaming I've seen is against Ubuntu, and that's because of Canonical's repeated attempts to turn Linux into Windows and push their own proprietary bullshit.
- I like Mint quite a bit myself. Mint Cinnamon is my preferred "just put Linux on it" distro.
  
  My comment was mostly tongue in cheek :-p

"I'm just really happy rn yall" - be careful with that rn command if you're anywhere near Arch, wouldn't want all your happy uninstalled! Seriously though, good for you! Welcome to freedom.

Honestly, I consider myself moderately tech savvy. But I also had issues with SecureBoot when installing Linux. It really doesn't help when every single BIOS has different settings and they all want to make everything as poorly worded and unintuitive as humanly possible.

"Oh, you want an on/off toggle for SecureBoot? Sorry, no. Let's just fuck with you until you either brick your motherboard or somehow manage to install Linux."

My congratulations! You've managed to get past the most difficult hurdle.

To be fair, writing technical documentation for this shit is possibly the most unpleasant job in the world. After 5 minutes I desperately want to fuck off and get high.

Good job, welcome to the free world of tech. Installing is often the hardest part.

Next lesson: forget about downloading installer from the browser, check out the software center or learn package manager commands, that's the first new thing about Linux.

If you want to mess with the command line, I recommend tldr. Anyone could do xkcd's tar challenge if they can run tldr tar first! (pretty sure it's in mint's apt repos)

tar --help
- not sure if arguing against tldr, or just trying to defuse a bomb

I reccomend trying TUI utilities to get better at Linux for example: btop, fastfetch, ranger, vim, and apt (also ignore anyone who tells you to sudo rm -rf /*)

I just learned about btop and nvim, I'll check those out :) thanks
- Heres some other cool utilities: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
Mind you though, it's not a requirement

Welcome to the dark side! We got cookies

You picked some really good books to get started with! Lot of online help these days!

CLI is love. CLI is life.

I went back and forth for about six years.

Then I began using Linux on a home NAS, then using the host GPU for virtualization, then proton... and when proton hit, that was basically.

Yep! Packing my shit! We're going to penguin land!

Congrats! Made the switch finally early this year myself, after thinking about it for nearly twenty years. Hasn't been nearly as hard as I was worried it would be.

I will say that the "Linux Basics for Hackers" is a pretty disappointing book that really should just be called "Linux Basics", and spends too much time pandering with things like "cool" scripts that do nothing useful or wrap a simple command in a way that doesn't actually make it more useful or easier. It's also full of inaccuracies and just isn't very well written, and if you've gotten through much at all of How Linux Works, you're not likely to get anything out of it.

Welcome! I have been using Mint many years now its a gold standard distro you made a solid choice.

Be mindful that Linux changes faster than a lot of books. I would stick to online documentation.

Schotts actually provides TLCL for free, and last updated it a month ago:

https://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php
Those books were published in 2019 and 2021. They'll still be mostly accurate a decade from now. Open-source developers usually try not to introduce breaking changes to mature software unless absolutely necessary.
Documentation is not the proper place for an absolute beginner to learn (unless it explicitly has tutorials, and even then they're not always great).
Books will teach the essentials: my core UNIX knowledge comes from an SVR4 book I read in the late 2000s (a decade or more after it was relevant) and it's still applicable today

Hell yeah!! Welcome, fellow penguin. 🐧

I'm about to repartition and reinstall everything. I'm very fucking tempted to drop this dual boot nonsense now that I have a good idea of what little I'd be losing.

I screwed up my dual boot a year ago and it was happiest mistake of my life. Forced me to learn linux, and now I feel like I live in the matrix with all my bright green terminals on i3.
- I remember when I used green on black lol. Good times at uni. Nowadays I even use light mode in the daytime... I get too sleepy with dark mode in the daytime lol. Guess I'm getting old.
You don't need to reinstall. You could keep the old partition and format it and add it as a new volume while keeping the current installation.

If the windows volume is to the right of the Linux volume, you could also boot a live-usb and drop the windows partition and then extend the Linux partition then extend the Linux filesystem to cover all disk space. If it is to the left, you can do the same but you'd need to move the partition and reinstall the bootloader as well.

A backup would be mandatory If you don't really know what you would be doing with the above, however. But if you do, it's a lot easier and faster than to rebuild everything from scratch.

The Linux Command Line book opened up a lot to me. How Linux Works is very good, but the command line is so essential, and that book gives you some great starting knowledge like aliases and shell scripting.

Especially aliases. Take note of aliases, when you start using aliases it can change your world once you realize how much you can accomplish with what essentially are one line programs you wrote for you own personal needs.

Welcome beyond the pale, friend. You've made it to the other side. Only freedom awaits, should you have the determination to work for it.

I added a line to my /etc/bash.bashrc:

alias shutup="sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm && poweroff"

So when I tell my command line to shut up, it auto updates and shuts down
- That's pretty spiffy

Welcome to the club! Mint is an excellent choice, especially from a beginner's perspective. Don't let that stop you from trying other things though if you get the temptation. Fedora and Arch are the two other 'families' I can think of to play with, though I've stuck with things in the Debian side of things myself.

lucky for you, my laptop in its entirity is unsupported by the linux kernel (msi gf63 thin 9sc)

entirity? how? doesn't it run at all?
- only as live system, with limited capabilities. i only run linux in virtual machine for now. don't buy msi gamer laptops

did the same thing and Did a raid0 btrfs config on my old windows drive.

That Linux command line book is really, really good. I love how it actually explains the commands and why to use them instead of just being a copy of each commands help document or something.

Congrats on ditching Windows!

Nice. I'm currently waiting on a "new" laptop, get off this old Core2 duo I'm typing on. Under $300 from a trusted ebay seller and I'll be in the right decade. Linux is awesome for using old hardware but my favorite part is the "free as in freedom" aspect.

If you do run into windows mandatory stuff it's not all that hard to run virtual machines now. I've been using VMWare player but on my incoming machine I'm going to give QEMU-KVM a shot. Move away from proprietary VMWare and onto free as in freedom software.

Oh my god. I had a E8400 when like WOW came out, fond memories.

So what kind of laptop are you getting?

Edit: I upgraded to the E8400 during the WoW aera, as WoW came out 2004 and the E8400 came out 2008. Still some time ago :-) !
- Lenovo t480s 16GB/512GB
  
  And I was just joking about this being a Core2, it's a i5-4xxx 4GB

I've got the same laptop and running mint. How is your wifi when you resume sleep or open your lid?

Haven't had any trouble, connects right up. What are you experiencing?
- Wifi not resuming when coming out of suspended state. It's a common Linux Mint issue. I just have my laptop shut down on lid close. No sleep time out

Congratulations! Enjoy the journey! You'll look back in a few years and wonder how you ever managed with a Windows set up while you slip into the comfy-ness of your customized system.

Anyone have tips for someone wanting to do the same but have two hurdles?

Need multi-org account support for Teams due to multiple contracts across different orgs. At the moment I could run Windows in a VM for it but then notifications are rough. An option is running teams in multiple browser profiles / tabs but this is also not entirely ideal (6-7 profiles/tabs just for teams is rough). Any clever ideas welcome, or someone who may have experience with Matrix bridges to accommodate this somehow? Does that work for adhoc calls?
Speedy remote desktop. Parcel seems to be the closest in speed to RDP thus far, but it doesn't consistently transmit shortcut keys which makes development difficult. Any other suggestions, gladly welcome.

3. (no longer an issue) if you've seen my past comments, I used to seek an alternative to Fancy Zones, but my fix for this was to just get rid of my ultrawide and go back to multiple monitors. So this is no longer needed.

I would recommend making a new post since hijacking someone else's is kinda rude imho.

What’s your initial impressions of the How Linux Works book?

Really clear and helpful! It's taken a lot of the intimidation away I think. I'd definitely recommend it to other noobs
- Have you tried gaming? I tried PopOs and now Mint like you, and Steam games do not detect my Nvidia card though I see it in Mint information preferences and I’ve tried many things.

I am extremely excited for you. Welcome.

No starch press is my favorite. Welcome!

Welcome to the community.

I do have a question: Do you like your current desktop environment (Cinnamon)? Some newcomers complain that it looks quite dated (which I agree). If so, you could try out KDE Plasma or GNOME instead.

Congrats for sticking it through!

welcome to the pain

Nice!!! I'm trying to be like you

Congratulations Comrade! Good luck to you in your new world of free awesome software. I escaped Windows years ago and can only imagine how bad it's gotten.

Giddyup!

I have been using Kubuntu as a daily driver for almost 10 year now, and never regretted it. I had one Windows box for things like special cases (like dumb website forms that won't let me use Linux), Pearson Vue exams, and edge cases related to work, but it's on standby as a secondary system I RDP into. I am not a gamer, so I didn't need it for that. I saved so much money not having to buy hardware in the last decade or so.

Sadly, Windows 11 won't work on anything I have (TPM issues, too old), so I recently got a cheap Windows 11 laptop before the tariffs hit and I pay more for dumb Windows-only reasons.

Linux all the way, man. Gave me a career, a life, and my hardware back.

Welcome to the community!

Linux mint my beloved

Love that command line book. Got it on my shelf next to me. Have fun

Way to go! Welcome to the club buddy! If you need help, don't be shy. You can DM me anytime and I'll do my best to help. :)

That's very kind of you, thanks!

Great work! Glad you're with us

Different distros deal with securebot differently. If you try OpenSUSE, secureboot works: you will be asked to enroll your keys after the install reboot. And you will see the ooensuse-secureboot entry in the UEFI boot order list.

You've got this! 🔥

I've used Linux for 20 years and never picked up a book on it. Not that there's anything wrong with the books, but let's not give the impression that it's necessary.

The NoStarch books are excellent overviews for newbies to go beyond being "just a user" though. They're written in a very friendly and approachable manner. If you're enthusiastic about learning how the OS works and playing with commands, they're really good about that! I think it's cool OP is repping rhem. :)

If someone was like "Hey I wanted to try Linux!" and thought they needed to go through LPIC/LINUX+ doorstoppers or had manuals about the kernel or something, I'd be like "Woah there. Calm down." LOL
- I hear ya. I use linux just fine but now and then I dicover a new trick or command and I'm like "holy shit it's a superpower". A good book could be gold.
When I bought a book on Linux, I followed it chapter by chapter then when I got to chapter 6 or something none of it matched my OS and I was lost again. It was really bad for a modern book.

I did learn a lot from the book, but quite discouraged after getting lost there.

About a year or 2 later I went full time in Linux after the windows Recall and their One drive was stealing all my files when it was disabled. I saw the sync icons all over my desktop with the computer idle. Last straw and I switched to Linux for good.

almost [email protected]

I'm enby so it's just a matter of time
[email protected] without thigh highs*

sudo right now -rf /

Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to a different comment

There’s always one lol
- Oh this was meant to be a reply to a different comment