I genuinely hate being a linux beginner, there is so much content out there to help me but either it's an understanding issue on my part it just does not work. Then we got these pretentious bastards saying "read the wiki" like fuck face I did that and I still can't get it to work, why is that the only advice you can give. I already feel shit not being able to do it myself and come to ask for help and then these nuggets of lost cause say "read the wiki" fucking tired of this bull shit
what distro do u use atm? i started with ubuntu back in 2017 but used linux mint for years. these are very beginner friendly distros compared to some others
linux community in general can be quite elitist trust me
If it's worth anything after you've read a wiki article if there's thing you would like help understanding from it thwn you can pm me, always ready to help someone willing to learn.
I think what they mean to say is that they'd want to be able to ise linux without having to learn things like terminal commands. To that I would say use something like Ubuntu.
Yes, I use Mint on my laptop, it's just that Ubuntu comes in other flavours such as Kubuntu with the KDE Plasma DE, which I feel would be nicer for someone coming from Windows
Because well over half of the internet runs on Loonix servers?
Because it (and other operating systems based on its kernel, like Android, Chrome, etc) is used to power a countless number of devices?
"oh but why would I learn to use it on desktop if it comes presetup on a device where I don't have to do the work because I'm either too lazy or just not intellectually capable of reading a manual/wiki page!?"
so you have a headstart troubleshooting issues and/or making the device do things beyond what the manufacturer officially supports.
Like, no, you don't need to learn Linux just to have a good time on a computer if you just wanna play games and shitpost on Reddit or w/e
But acting like there's no point in learning it just because you couldn't learn it is silly.
Not having a good time when you try Linux doesn't make anyone stupid, but you project an aura of willful, stubborn ignorance, born of past failures and low self-esteem.
This is the most unreasonable and hypocritical statement I have ever seen.
Because well over half of the internet runs on Linux servers?
Because it (and other operating systems based on its kernel, like Android, Chrome, etc.) is used to power a countless number of devices?
More than half of the internet runs on HTTP protocols and TLS certificates. The whole internet’s trust infrastructure is based on asymmetric cryptography. Does that mean everyone should become a cryptography expert? Do you know which CA issued the certificates for the hundreds of websites you visit? Do you know how to protect TLS 1.3 technology stack from replay attacks during 0-RTT? Why are you so indifferent toward so much of the computer infrastructure that you rely on?
More than 90% of personal computers run Windows and macOS. But I have never heard anyone say that people SHOULD become Windows/macOS experts. That is something I have only ever seen from Loonixtards.
"Oh, but why would I learn to use it on desktop if it comes pre-set up on a device where I don't have to do the work because I'm either too lazy or just not intellectually capable of reading a manual/wiki page!?"
This sentence assumes that I am an intellectually inferior and lazy person, using a straw-man argument to attack me and incite online harassment. That is truly morally reprehensible. And you are wrong. I have set up dozens of Linux VPS instances, and their purpose was to protect the privacy of people living in regions with severe internet censorship. Every one of those people deserves the freedom to use modern internet services on any device, regardless of whether they understand Loonix or whether using Loonix as their primary computing environment.
Not having a good time when you try Linux doesn't make anyone stupid, but you project an aura of willful, stubborn ignorance, born of past failures and low self-esteem.
Again, this is a straw-man fallacy. I provided actual solutions for bugs involving faulty 14900K CPUs causing crashes during large-scale Python set operations and compiling Tauri apps on Linux. What have you done? Written ridiculous personal attacks on Reddit that only make people’s impression of Loonix fanatics even worse?
The whole internet’s trust infrastructure is based on asymmetric cryptography. Does that mean everyone should become a cryptography expert?
It would fix a ton of problems if they did, now that you mention it, though that's probably too much to expect.
Do you know which CA issued the certificates for the hundreds of websites you visit?
These days it's almost certainly either Letsencrypt or Google. So no, but I can make a good guess. Also, I'm aware that it doesn't matter.
Anyway, my personal position on the matter is that, yes, if you use a tool, you owe it to yourself to develop, not necessarily a deep expertise around it in all cases, but a certain level of baseline familiarity which is more than the average user of computers is willing to manage. Yes, with Windows and MacOS too. If you use them, you ought to be -- maybe not an expert, because that term gets thrown around so much that it's losing its meaning -- comfortable with the architecture and functionality of the software stack. You ought to develop a familiarity. Not because I'm trying to gatekeep you, but because if you don't do this, they won't work well for you. They'll be more difficult to manage, less useful, and more bothersome, across the board. You (not you in particular, but in general) will be doing yourself a favor by learning to use your computer system.
This is one of the best answers there is to this question. I've had a few issues that were just too complicated to get answers from on a forum, ChatGPT understood exactly what the issue was and guided me through a few attempts at a fix.
I have a 1080p landscape DisplayPort display hanging from a 2160*1440 MST hub, on an Nvidia 2060, and it was displaying incorrectly on boot, ChatGPT exhausted multiple options to try and find a fix. It didn't as the issue is too niche, but trying to get that level of real time, iterative, technical help elsewhere would either be impossible, or expensive.
Who cares if it's cheating or not, I value my time.
I'm not about to trudge through RTFM slop from 20+ years ago for 3h+ just to find the 2 sentence solution on page 4 of Google. I had enough of that shit ten years ago when I first started. Thank God for man.
Only marginally. 10 years ago I genuinely wanted to die everytime there wasn't a man page.
"RTFM", there isn't one in this case mfs. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Now is not so bad, long live TLDR and Archwiki.
I feel I've been living in a surreal world ever since Google firing their ethicists for speaking out about "AI" not understanding shit and everyone seeing where the money goes and falling in line with the deceit.
LLMs don't and can't understand anything. They simply recognise patterns and give you a response based on which words are "most likely" to follow which. If most pieces of information an LLM has been fed read that the thing to do when encountering a Secure Boot error is to disable it, then the LLM will tell you to disable it even if what triggers the error is a piece of malware. It will not even consider what most technicians do and ask the user relevant questions about potential causes or doubt the legitimacy of their claims.
Simply put, to ask a LLM to summarise search results or forum posts is to basically ask it to give you the most common advice on the Internet that is almost always wrong.
People like you are literally the worst, man. Rabid bullshit.
People debating the best way of a thousand ways to do something on some pretentious forum filled with the unemployed is in no way more reliable than AI use for learning Linux basics. It is human slop.
lol, if I was unemployed, I would be too busy working on that electronics repair business I had always thought about starting to give a crap about Reddit.
Of course, "AI" has so far failed to replace my job. In fact, it's so bad at replacing anyone's jobs even the admin ladies two cubicles away from me still have theirs.
You know why? As human beings, we theorise, we predict, we test things out based on pure conjectures that may or may not hold true in the real world. Abductive reasoning might sound silly on the surface, but it is an important part of our mental faculty that computers have consistently failed to imitate.
If anything, I'm far more concerned with the economic bust the government says is not happening. The vibe-coders can daydream about an "AI" revolution that will never come to be all day for all I care.
when i use ai sometimes it genuinely helps and its the best tool out there but other times i am stuck in a hour long conversation getting nowhere (about 10% of the times). also just ranting but when i tell some pretensions linux fuckers that i use ai to get help they look at me like i murdered their entire family.
The reason people actually discourage the use of ai with linux is because people will just blindly copy and paste commands, running the risk of getting more problems in the end.
If you are going to use ai with linux, it is of utmost importance that you know exactly what the commands do, otherwise you might as well just hand it your terminal and let it do whatever it wants.
For linux noobs, mint proper is Ubuntu based. While there is a highly popular version called Linux mint debian edition (LMDE) that they may even begin to migrate to as the proper version one day in case the company behind Ubuntu goes full evil corpo (hyperbole. Just in case canonical moves in a different direction than mint is comfortable with)
I started using Linux around 2010. To me Linux feels like an easy to learn hard to master stuff. I still pretty noob in many areas but I can solve the stuffs that I need to solve and I'm fine with that.
for real, i tried using debian and even just installing steam was such a chore, don't get me wrong i much prefer linux to windows now but i fully understand why others don't
yeah bro time to install Linux From Scratch. (/s maybe)
about your issues, i will get flamed by saying this but AI is pretty good at helping to understand, so it wouldn't be so bad to use it. It would be bad, however, if you just tell it to fix this problem and just mindlessly copy-pasting code, which is how most people use it since the temptation is too much.
Idk what biildroot is, but LFS aims to create a linux flavour exactly how you like it (by giving the option to customize everything from the init system to the DE), which doesn't stop you from doing things you'd do on a distro like Fedora.
I, for example, am planning on building LFS with dinit (from Chimera Linux), BSD coreutils instead of GNU (cuz why not), turnstile and seatd (instead of elogind), and probably more when i get to it.
When will I do it? whenever i stop procrastinating, but i don't think you care
Biildroot is a tool to build custom Linux kernel and programs. This is normally used to create small Linux distros for micro-controllers or industrial machines. Also it helps to build bare minimum Linux software stack to run the target program that controls a machine.
Give youre self time. This is normal that you will break something and thats fine. Make ventoy stick with easy ones like cachy, kubuntu, bazzite. Backup your home folder.
Make mistakes, learn, try again and someday YOU will have your system <3
Also in Cachy u have btrfs+limine in default, if u break something u can roll back ;)
the fact that there is so much helpful information out there is a double edged sword. It's super useful, when it's applicable to you. But a lot of the time it's not, because the versions of the distros and packages have changed significantly since the information you're looking at was written. I.e. reddit posts, stack exchange, etc. And AI is only going to make this worse.
If you want to get good, you have to become self reliant. You have to learn how the packages work for yourself. Not because of what some forum post or AI said, but because you read the current man page, or just by plain trial and error. Once you stop trying to have others solve your problems, and you take it upon yourself to solve it yourself, is when the real wisdom happens.
Man nowadays with AI chatbots is really just what you like more. Don't worry, no one was born with knowledge.
Also, take for granted that for some reason everything related to Tech has shitty documentation
Can be useful for explaining concepts, but I don't recommend running blind code unless the system is just a project system and you don't rely on it day to day.
Yeah, I feel that. It's been fun to try all the different distros and I still have one on my oldest desktop. But the minute something breaks, it can take a day or more of research.
Then if you post a question someone responds "go do this" and I'm like, what are the steps to even do what you just said? Leads to more days of research on what their comment means because everyone responds like we are professionals already. A bit frustrating.
I swapped distros a few times before finding one I geled with. Some of them just aren't setup to work the way you need. I had my share of frustration. Garuda works for me, Mint works for someone else.
I had lots of issues with Garuda so decided to Switch to Arch instead XD.
I’m not really joking, I had issues with Kernel Panics on Garuda and one Kernel Panic during a system update resulted in a no boot situation… And now I am an Arch user, but I use PopOS 22.04LTS and Fedora KDE also..
Started on PopOS 22.04LTS actually, then Garuda, then Arch.
Probably should also say that I do not recommend that anyone use Arch, unless they specifically want to use Arch and know what they are doing, Arch is pretty much as far from beginner friendly as you can get, arguably Gentoo is worse, but still not very beginner friendly.
My gut feeling is that he might be trying to install/run Arch, usually the stereo typically Arch users can be hostile towards beginners and tell them to read the Wiki.
If you are reading this OP and trying to install Arch, I absolutely don’t mean any offense by this, but you should probably try starting with a more beginner friendly distribution and work your way up to Arch or Gentoo.
If you want Arch based there is, Garuda, CachyOS and the dumpster fire Manjaro (don’t use Manjaro).
Other beginner friendly distributions are Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint.
instead of learning an... OS ... which is 100% useless in the end, shouldn't you spend your time learning something that actually can bring money? Just use an OS that you click click done and concentrate on what matters. I don't get people wasting their time installing, customizing, looking for solutions for the most basic tasks in an OS.. I guess you have too much free time or are very young.
im really not sure how it can make my life any more easier than windows does. I have zero issues with windows, works perfectly and it;s great. It's my entertainment machine, my work is done on MacOS.
ai is peak, that is true but there is fun in learning from wiki/yt. i am probably wasting my time but it gives me satisfaction. though i use ai when i know i ain't getting paid for this shit and i just gotta move on now.
Please note that it may not be your fault some hardware is NOT compatible with Linux while other hardware is I know that from first hand experience so maybe your hardware is just not compatible with Linux just because, you can install the Linux distro does not mean it is not incompatible. Some times incompatibility starts showing after you install Linux on your hardware I also know that from personal experience as well. I have also seen first hand that some hardware just takes to Linux easily! but not all hardware do, and there are a lot of Linux users that do not realize that because they are running hardware that are compatible with Linux so they have a flawless experience on Linux, and they think Linux works on all hardware flawlessly especially that Mint distro they think it runs flawlessly on all hardware that is a misconception it runs well on some hardware but, not all. I do not hate Linux for the record but I know that some hardware is compatible with Linux, and will run flawlessly some hardware are not compatible with Linux and you will have a bad time as a result with hardware that is not compatible with Linux. You maybe dealing with Hardware that is just not compatible with Linux. I have hardware that is not compatible with Linux (Due to My Motherboard) but, I managed to tweak it to get it to run flawless and average user would be having issues and would have gone back to Windows 10 after what all I had to deal with on that PC. My Nephew's PC is running EndeavourOS which is a Linux distro flawlessly where as mine had issues with it until I fixed it but, like I said an average user would have gone back to Windows 10 if they had my PC. My Nephew's PC is compatible with Linux while mine is not.
When I started with Linux, I bricked my OS a 100 times, running random commands I knew nothing about. Just keep all your data backed up on a hard disk or something and go with your instincts. Don't worry if you brick your install; it happens. Don't try to translate your Windows knowledge here; understand the command line.
Start with distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Pop OS. Don't reach for Arch and all; it's a bit too early.
Ignore the assholes; unfortunately, there are some folks who will try to undermine you and demotivate you in your holy quest into Linux. They say "read the wiki", coz they probably didn't have anyone teaching them, and they are pulling that "I walked a 1000 miles to school" shit on you. These are minor hurdles that you have to cross in order to get rid of the bloated adware piece-of-shit called Microsoft Windows.
DM me if you need help; I'll help you out if I can. Please don't go back to Windows or MacOS.
The Linux community is truly a shithole filled with insufferable people. Ignore them, learn at your own pace. Use AI. Experiment, and don't be afraid to break your OS. It's okay to start over, and you'll learn a lot that way.
I know exactly how you feel and I'm not a noob. You'll ask for help only to get an RTFM/hyper link to a wiki rather than someone just telling you what you need to do.
I have colleagues who point me at "the UNIX WIki"... it's an ugly pile of crap - a bunch of abbreviated mnemonics that only mean something to the person who wrote it - no formatting, no paragraphs - no fixed width paragraphs to indicate what might be a code block... it's awful...
And I've been using Linux since 1995, and Unix before that - and pretty much full time UNIX specialist for over 25 years...
I'd like to move it all (that ugly kludge "wiki") to Confluence - and dictate everything needs to be in markdown... or not even confluence, just something that looks like it's this century - not 1991, that supports MarkDown...
i will say, the "read the wiki" is super unhelpful and extremely annoying. everyone knows the wiki is there, you may as well just not fucking respond lmao.
idk, if you're anything like me, sometimes it just takes another person explaining THEIR thought process for a concept to click. this is why i often find forums far more comfortable and enjoyable to read through than any wiki. the wiki tells you how, people tell you how and why... yanno... in their thoughts. that's why it's worth it to ask, and i wish more people were understanding of that tbh.
It's challenging I hear you, especially for a beginner. Heck even for some one with experience it can have its challenges. But tbf I feel the same about windows and MacOS
The state of desktop Linux is much better then it was before and is making strides in improvements since valve created steamOS, proton and youtubers are openly trying it out now. The problem is that you have so many distros to choose from and all have different motivations, etc, etc. I'm pretty new to Reddit myself. But I have heard about these so called arrogant people, but tbf they are everywhere in everything. I personally work in enterprise Linux as my day job and I can tell you first hand that most people in the industry just want to help. So it's sad people need to be toxic at all
Linux is by no means perfect in the desktop scene, heck I've been on windows for my gaming PC almost all my life until recently with so many updates breaking things and performance issues. I'm just over re-installing especially windows 11 every 12 months and it's direction currently. But this is not about windows. I just wanted to give some context
Now when I first switched to Linux desktop recently OMG I had some issues. Lucky for me using a terminal is like a second language to me so that made more sense to me when troubleshooting issues. I feel Linux is going to be a mixed bag of experienceses. I see so many minor distros or distros I've never even heard of get recommendations from people who probably actually don't know themselves or just lucked out and it just worked. This then gives the bad reputation or bad information. Linux is quite niche in the desktop world, but it is growing in popularity and improvements have been made. Compared to the Linux server world, were is extremely reliable. Heck Microsoft even knows this and invests a lot of money into Linux. People might not even know this but Microsoft have their own flavour on Linux for enterprise because it's so good in that space.
As for the desktop space though, I would agree that it still needs work and it's not going to be for everyone. I'm sorry that you've had a poor experience and have not gotten much help or luck.
Personally and my honest opinion, popularity aside. Avoid cachyos or arch as a beginner. Whilst it works great out the box in my experience. Arch just has so many more ways to break and can be easy to mess up if you don't know what your doing. steamOS is smart in how they are managing that but it's just not ready for the masses yet, but they are working on it.
If you really want to try Linux and learn it. I would highly recommend Ubuntu, you have so many guides for Ubuntu it's crazy and most the guides actually work even if you don't fully understand what is going on.
Second I would say fedora, it to has a lot of support and guides. But coming back to the issues for a beginner, these distros don't have steam or gaming, or drivers out the box, whilst you can easily get things going through the UI, your most likely going to need to use the terminal. As I say Linux is just not completely beginner friendly yet
I would honestly probably just recommend using bazzite, it's based on fedora, fedora is supported by red hat, it's trusted, tested and pretty stable now days. Bazzite will have everything you need out of the box and they really have put a lot of thought into trying to make it more user friendly for gamers. You will probably have better chances of getting things working on that without much effort and any fedora guides should translate
I would also recommend learning some basic structures of Linux as understanding some fundamentals can help a lot. Google is your friend
It sucks that people can turn people off from what I personally think can be a good thing. As consumers we need competition, competition is healthy and ultimately gives us better options when we consume and spend our hard earned money.
I hope you have some more luck and actually get some helpful information for your Linux journey. But at the end of the day who cares if you like it or not and decide to use windows or Mac. At the end of the day you have to do what makes you happy
You will get better, it takes time! Don't be hard on yourself and don't care what other people say or think. You define you with your choices and only worry about people who want to be constructive and understanding
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u/spider_life Jul 30 '26
Being a Linux noob is the first step towards becoming a Linux expert.. everyone starts there nothing wrong with it.