Honestly I learned linux because I needed to turn some pumps on and off…

Made some arduino based controllers, but those were a pain to figure out how to access remotely, so raspberry pi it was, but eventually I needed more horsepower, so debian it was, then ESP-32s were popularized and now I’ve come full circle with a fleet of ESP-32s reporting to a debian server… eventually I’ll get around to understanding some of the hardware interface in the OS a bit more.

All of it by just kind of bumping into problems

There are Linux distributions where you never need to touch the command line unless you’re doing advanced stuff.

But if you’re a Windows person who wants to be able to use the command line, and you think hacking is cool…

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

SSH into a server and find the password to get to the next level. Linux hacking for babies, and you can do it from a Windows computer.

The beef i have with printed tech literature is tat it ages out pretty quickly.
I prefer man pages and wikis.

Around 2006 I watched a video on YouTube of a guy showing off Pendrive Linux booting from a USB drive and it blew my mind that you could run an entire OS from a lowly USB drive. I then made my own and used it to play games on the computers at my middle school and have been unfortunately addicted to Linux ever since. Later on in my 20s I took a Linux class in college and my professor was really impressed I already knew so much about Linux. 8 years of “brute forcing it” taught me quite a bit. Now I’m a jaded network administrator and have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

You don’t need to read books, most stuff can be found in the Arch Wiki

I rawdogged it then took classes and learned like 1% more than I knew before from raw-dogging

Yes, there are classes, but it’s corporate Linux. Dockerfiles, AWS, shit like that.

Anyways:

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

Well, it doesn’t matter much, actually.

If you actually wonder, it’s a database (can be sqlite, tho most write their own which involves it’s own set of quantum physics and mathematics for operations) of stuff that’s installed and stuff that’s available. “Updating repos” downloads the list of stuff and their dependencies. Actually installing involves it downloading an archive, extracting it, looking at some special file that describes it (list of files, version, hash…), doing verification stuff, checking if dependency constraints are met (again, involves database mathematics…), adding the info of the package to the “installed” database then just extracting the entire archive EXCEPT the describing/meta/special/whatever file(s) right into your root. Or whatever you told it is root.

You can make a tiny bootable Linux by literally extracting some critical packages from, for example, Alpine Linux, using your average GUI archive viewing tool.

OpenRC & SystemD

“Well, the difference being, one is a j*b and the other is mental sickness” - RED Sniper, Team Fortress 2

OpenRC is an init system. It’s a system that starts (inits) different programs meant to be ran all the time (daemons).

SystemD is a suite of software. It has a few fucktons of components. Although in the context of an init system they mean the init system SystemD comes with. It may not be that bad by itself, but the other components are often poor in quality and/or resource heavy. Most distributions ignore most of them by default. And yet, everything is relying on them to the point where people who don’t want the entirety of SystemD had to rewrite SystemD’s components for themselves, and not the other way around.

Wayland

Protocol with a few fucktons of extensions, like X11. For putting stuff on a screen.

Difference is that X11 has functions for drawing lines and circles and shit and everything kinda went around that, which is useful with 2D accelerated hardware (if you enable it in the driver) but everything really recent (2016?) isn’t so it’s pointless there. It’s also decades old. And window manager (and often compositor, thing doing transparency effects and stuff) is separate.

The very base of Wayland is basically a program asking for a new window and then it just has to draw stuff there itself, while extensions handle stuff like negotiating clipboard. (spoiler: if you don’t have a clipboard manager there is no “clipboard”, pasting something asks the program you copied from so if you closed that you don’t have it). It also has HDR. Shitty but HDR. Unfortunately the progress on that is slow, because it’s the @redhat.com email people dictating all the specs and making countless meetings about them of course, and everyone else just sits and listens to their bullshit. Oh, and server/compositor/wm is all one single program (although a project called “wlroots” provides most of the “server” part as a piece of code devs can copy paste). Anyways, KDE Plasma/kwin is the most feature complete server out there, although I personally “outgrowed” from it if that makes sense

Hyprland

Some kid made a Wayland server. Pretty ok quality (!!! relatively). Originally wlroots but later it’s own thing (“hyproot”). It’s meant for “eyecandy” shit setups, not a fan of that, ew gross, although to each their own kinks. BUT to get the stereotypical “”“eyecandy”“” one has to either (1) spend their entire free time on fucking with configuration files and installing everything or (2) get someone else’s giant ass script which compiles stuff from 16 guthib repos and then freshly extracts you a 2 gig .config directory. Lots of the time people end up turning their bar/desktop/whatever into a fucking web browser, like it’s MicroWin from SoftDows. Knowingly or from a dependency for some stupid AUR package that doesn’t read like it would do that by name, like “hyprpanel-git”. I am not going to link an example of the dependency, it’s aylur<dot>github<dot>io<slash>ags if you really want to look at that. I hope moss grows on walls of everyone who did that knowingly and actually liked it.

As for me personally, I used it for a while for it’s HDR support but just never installed a bar or anything. Turned off the shaders, the wallpaper, the splash, the rounding stuff, the borders, and… “Hey, get me a Hyprland with NOTHING”. So yeah. Later there was some really fucking annoying shrodenbug, I rage quit and switched to sway-git. It also has HDR nowadays, tho you gotta bind keys for turning it on/off because screensharing sucks. Just like at “home”, on WinSoft from MicroDows.

20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING

Never too late I guess.

DSL! Such a classic.

Ah yes the college of “Fuck it, we ball”.

Well the first time I ran Linux was in 99-2000, before I had proper internet (one needed to buy these prepaid dialup cards and winmodems wouldn’t work on Linux), so actually had to buy a book ‘The Linux Bible’. Used that book a lot, especially in the early days to troubleshoot LILO (Before GRUB) bootloader and configure dual boot. Of course, once internet was readily available, online search / forums replaced those books. Last book I bought was about redhat/mandrake rpm packaging.

not only i rawdogged linux, i used a rolling distro with a lot of questionable security decisions (eherm… Manjaro) during grad school.

… no idea how that laptop survived grad school but it did…

I was like 13 when I installed Red Hat and I totally needed to use the book it came with because I had no idea what I was doing.

Linux almost needs continuing education courses. New shit comes out, and if you don’t try it in the next 5-7 years, you’ll end up getting it anyway.

You shouldn’t have to take a class for an operating system…

I learned by looking shit up on internet forums. Still kinda dawg shit at it though.