this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Mint, judge me
PS anyone have any favorite resources for absolute tech illiterate noobs? I'm trying, but without a baseline understanding of the subject, it's hard to find the right guides
you're not using debian? that must mean you hate freedom.
My advice is to get a hobby. Self-hosting, or home automation to name a few examples. When you have a specific goal for something you want to do, it's a lot easier to learn.
First half has the actual advice
Literally the most suggested newbie distro, so you're probably fine :)
Like, ideologically I may mention it's Ubuntu-based so it sucks, but from end user perspective, it's alright.
Doubling down on literacy, Linux guides are either "here's how to do that absolutely basic thing" or "using veheydgvrl for quantumschropping the badumbliss". To me, Mental Outlaw produced quite some simple guides (warning: most vids are rants so you'll have to search for actual guides), Veronica Explains might be the fun option and not bloated with anything but tech, and just searching for solutions to whatever your issue is before you grasp how it works.
They have a debian based version, it's pretty awesome. It's still a beta fork atm, but it's rock solid so far
Yep, true. But currently, I don't see much point in LMDE, as Debian 12 is user-friendly enough as it is - though you're free to disagree.
Mint is a very nice starting distro tbh, it was my first too!
What exactly are you trying to do?
That's the thing, I don't know enough to know what to even ask. So far I've been able to follow step-by-step instructions for installing Mint and downloading software, but I don't know what I'm doing at all.
One example of something I spent hours on is adding Cura to the panel. I finally got that done while I was writing this comment by following AndyMH's answer here.
Now, I can read
And I can do that. I have no idea what PATH is or why I want to do that, but I can do it. And I can look it up, and I'm sure I'll eventually get to a point where all of this makes sense to me, but I feel kind of helpless when I have to look up multiple terms every time I want to do something as simple as adding an application to the panel
Fair enough.
Its really only for non standard installs. That is outside of the package manager or flatpak.
PATHis just where the computer will look for executables. Since you installed from source or some other side then it won't be in the normal/bin. You're just updating yourPATHto include other places.Depends on what you're wanting to learn. I'm a fellow tech illiterate noob, but I've been off and on with Linux since like 2006. Finally switched full time a few years ago. Honestly, with Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora I've found you basically can just set it and forget it, depending on your use case. YouTube has been my best friend whenever I have a problem, normally I type my issue into that before even google. How long have you been using Linux? If you're still in the distro hopping phase,I suggest trying to swap Desktop environments instead of distros, as it gives you a little experience with the terminal, is well documented on how to do it, and gives you a good idea of what kind of UI you want
That's all I got, though. I really am pretty illiterate at tech stuff haha
This may be shit advice, but it may help.
I have a mint laptop and was also linux illiterate when I started. The way I did most of my learning was by googling (or duckduckgo-ing) "How do I [x] linux mint" and reading through stack overflow threads. If this doesn't return results, (almost) any solution for Debian or Ubuntu will work on Mint.
In general, I just assumed that if I thought the computer could do it, there would be a way to do it.
Literally me. Can confirm, Stack Overflow is based.
Mint is the shit! The only reason I don't use it is because they don't have a native KDE version. If they ever do, I plan on going right back Mint.