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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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My (satisfying) experience moving to Linux! (self.linux)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by jamie_oliver to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just wanted to share my experience moving to Linux from MacOS. Very satisfying, but of course not at first. I think my patience has improved a lot too lol.

I started out trying live bootables on my 2012 MBA. 4GB RAM, 60GB HDD. Not a beast really, but it is my only computer. I obviously couldn't risk ending up without a working OS, so the only option was dual boot from an external drive. Bought an SSD connected via USB and started trying to install distros. Initially Fedora Workstation. Was a mess. Slow, wifi was not working well, odd crashes etc.. Decided to start over with something lighter, but all other installers crashed halfway through. I kid you not I shot my back again bent over my small laptop i without working peripherals trying to install different distros. My doctor was not happy when I came back and told her I fucked up my back again because of my posture lol. Apparently, a shitty USB leads to crashes on most installers. I knew Anaconda worked tho, so I went back to a lighter DE with Fedora, XFCE. Set up an install on the SSD with a shared partition I could access from both MacOS and fedora. No big permission issues yet.

Then fixing network drivers. There is a lot of info about what chip needs what driver, a lot of which is incorrect apparently, because my chip which was supposed to work with bcma needed broadcom-wl. The joy when I remembered USB tethering was a thing.. For a laptop with no ethernet plug this was a godsend. Got the drivers, got wifi.

And since then, many "issues" I encountered where simply things that generally happened behind the scenes on MacOS I didn't even know where happening. Learning about these things has been very gratifying, and gives a lot of respect for a polished OS that just works like magic. Eventually, an issue on MacOS I could not solve due to it being a walled garden made me switch to Linux as a daily driver, and once I got over CMD and CTRL being swapped it sped up my workflows and runs better overall. More tweaking tho of course.

There are odd quirks but I found fun solutions for some, and began planning and learning to remedy others. Mostly, everything is working really well. I am having a lot of fun!

My tip for anyone struggling with getting started with linux, set up a log function so you can easily log any relevant changes you make, and have it accessible from somewhere else (like a shared partition or external drive for example). This way you know what you have done and can use that to fix whatever you fuck up. Also, make a knowledge base with the sources you find useful. I have a small kb in UpNote now so I can look up how some things were done instead of having to search and find the right guides over and over.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Rather than reading the whole log just to add a line to it, you can use >> to append to the end of the file.

function log()
{
	local changelog="/run/media/jamie/DUAL/changelog"
	if [ "$1" == "--view" ]; then
		cat $changelog
	else
		echo "$(date +%D:%H:%M): $1" >> $changelog
	fi
}

[–] jamie_oliver 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Nice I didn't know that ^^ should probably learn at least the basic bash operators, I am just hacking together the different commands I happen to know at the moment really

Edit: why echo instead of printf?

This was causing a lot of issues with newlines, like when I fetched the log to view it my $ was right after the log entry so I switched it back. But it is probably useful in the future to use >> instead :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Also. If you do want to add an option to show the last few lines of the log using tail instead of cat will do it.

[–] jamie_oliver 1 points 18 hours ago

Thanks that is real helpful! A lot easier than what I had fuzzily in mind