Okay. I'm going to try to keep this coherent, hopefully my meaning comes across, and people know what I'm getting at and can relate. And also it serves to bring to people's attention some useful information. Okay here we go, a couple of statements here:

(1) I've been on Linux for 3 days now. I have broken my system, and had to start from scratch twice now. And, there is no question about it, I have fallen in love with Linux. And I will never leave this operating system. Ever.

(2) I have stuff to do, like the reasons that I migrated here in the first place, so am having to balance a to-do list, with the necessary learning that must take place, with respect to Linux, in order for me to get those things done. You understand, there's only so many hours in the day, and at the same time, there is no shortcut to a thorough understanding of what you're doing and why you are doing it.

(3) that being said, with every catastrophic failure, and "successful" installation, that I realize is, in reality, ultimately doomed, because of some fundamental flaw- I have a growing desire to become the best Linux user I can be. And build the most stable and well designed system that I can.

(4) you can use the same commands on a 2023 Linux system, and operate a Unix terminal from 1979. That's pretty amazing. On the other hand though, things move incredibly quickly. And I, as a new person, may or may not be correctly identifying the best sources of current information.

(5) so what are your thoughts? Regarding Universal, distro agnostic stuff, or more niche information ( I think most content creators do cover a spectrum, if they cover it at all, but I'll just put it out there, that a cinnamon mint 21.1 bias will suit me just fine, just saying). E.g. I was feeling Chris Titus, his fundamentals seem sound, like enable ufw, his proclivity to avoid bloat and keep things lean, is emphasis on security,fail2ban, pin priority, apparmor, SELinux ... but then I see that a lot of those videos are two to three years old. Some are 8 months old only.

But to Circle back: sure there are commands in use today, that will work perfectly on a 50-year-old unix terminal, but at the same time stuff moves really fast. And I don't know how to know if I'm doing things optimally.

My first time around with cinnamon 21.1, I installed a bunch of stuff, things off GitHub, updates, packages from synaptic, I was eager to get Ableton Live up and running because I hear it's finally stable, but I'm installing wine and wine tricks, and then I hear that it's not necessary, in a forum, people talking about instability and crashing, somebody says yeah they took care of that by uninstalling everything, wine included, then reinstalling but skipping all of the wine tricks and other stuff, and that cured all of the instability...

Point being, that as I performed this sort of refinement, of my OS install, I began using fewer and fewer packages, applications. And I sort of took a deep breath, had a drink of water, and started to consider how I had been going about things, and how I might look while going about things if I took things a bit more seriously.

So, wrapping up: there is no substitute for experience and making mistakes, and investment of time and energy towards learning whatever piece of technology you are trying to use and understand. I know that. And I'm into that. Buuut, in between, to be able to at least split my resources, evenly maybe, perhaps, between working with Linux tools, and learning Linux as a tool, How can I better do this, while keeping missteps, lost/sunk time, and major F-ups to minimum?

And, in conclusion: what methods and syntax is timeless and eternal? What stuff is here today gone tomorrow? Or rather hear last week, gone yesterday, maybe. Is Nix how I should be managing packages? Tony Teaches Tech strikes me as being a very good Channel to learn from. Is he well known, do you agree? Or is my head up my ass and I clearly don't know who to listen to and who not to listen to.

Also, one final final thing, as I am terrified of getting some virus or malware or whatever, from just copy pasting some persons sudo git work-around, and just realistically, going line by line through all code is probably not something I'm able to do, I don't think, not at this point at least, so I considered just passing it all along to gpt4, and saying is this legit? Does that seem acceptable? Or at least acceptably safe and sound, logically strategically?

I'm going to shut up now. Hopefully this all made sense.

Well, you certainly seem to believe in getting your hands dirty! Don't worry, you'll get lots of advice. Mine would be:

1) Use one distro (doesn't matter which one) for a month or two until you really get the hang of it.
2) Learn to use your distro's package manager to install software. Don't just download and install zipped packages; that's the Windows way of doing things and it doesn't work well on Linux.
3) If something you really want isn't available from your distro's package repository, learn how to build it locally.
4) Read man pages religiously.
5) Steer clear of Youtube. Some people there know what they're talking about but a lot of people don't and give bad advice.
6) The Arch wiki is a useful mine of information even for those who don't use Arch.
7) Ask clear detailed questions and carry out and report back any diagnostics that people here ask you for.
8) Don't worry about viruses. Linux is pretty resistant to those because of its ownership and permission system.

Enjoy!!

3 members found this post helpful.

Thread from a few years ago:

Who are the most knowledgeable among the prolific Linux youtubers?

In addition to the above, I'd recommend keeping your base OS stable and spinning up VMs (Virtual machines) to learn/experiment/break...

That way you can use the base OS to get stuff done and research what to do on the VMs.

(or buy a 2nd hand cheap computer for the experimentation stuff)

You might take a look at the Going Linux website. Both the podcast and the website are excellent resources.

You might also check out The Linux Documentation Project. It seems to me that the site has stalled in recent years, but, as you pointed out, when it comes to the command line, many things haven't changed, or, at least, haven't changed much. When I started with Linux, I found several of their guides invaluable, particularly Garrels's Introduction to Linux and Bash Guide for Beginners. Printouts of those two still sit on my bookshelf.

Thanks for the advice.

Hi Hazel, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your advice. There were some big (healthy) bits to ingest there, so it did take me a while to actually, genuinely give it a shot. In particular the advice about package managers and/or use github repos, 'build locally', I went full-blown deep end with that. Started using my old github for stuff, like other than just cloning and commenting. I started downloading the zip's , and created a few of my own repos (some actually working), and an organization, set up SSH, and git CLI (not working), and integrated with VS Code, and finally got my head around saves vs commits vs staging vs pushing / pulling.
And the other things was... hmm I've deleted, no, "abbreviated" most of your msg already, tbh here, hmm... oh the man pages. I was beating my head against the wall, trying to figure out all this cli bash syntax, and lamenting in various discords etc "how do i REMEMBER all these commands??". Then somebody told me to reference the "manual(s)" with this useful command, and then it clicked! And I instantly understood what he/you were talking about. So thanks! It's been very helpful. I find that a little shell script, a .desktop file, or even an executable added to usr/bin, that I can call up and have a reference of bash commands, and then I'm able to "man <command i vaguely recall>" and get on track real quick. I'm loving it. So gain, thanks.

If you can't exactly remember the name of a command but you remember what it does, use apropos with the subject to get a list of possibly relevant man pages.

There's a nice online HTML version of the man pages here https://linux.die.net/man/.

However, things can vary a bit, depending on the distro & version, so the definitive version is always the one that came with your system.