[clue-talk] I wish I'd known

[Nate Duehr]

skipworthy wrote:

>
> fellow Nixians...A discussion I was having with someone else made me 
> curious...Although most people gravitate to Linux (GNU, BSD whatever) 
> in the course of already being competent in 'computer', many aren't 
> necessarily right away. I know I came to *nix from Windows, and had to 
> grok many many things that were different in order to be successful 
> and enjoy it both as a hobby and a prefession. So the question is : 
> What do you wish you knew or understood sooner when getting started 
> with Linux ? Or what, in your opinion should a 'newbie' know or 
> understand?
>
It's going back a long way for me, but the hardest *initial* thing to 
understand was that everything is configurable in a text file 
somewhere.  All the wizards and helpers and add-on scripts and GUI's and 
junk... all just edit a file somewhere.

Once you get that and understand how to get around the filesystem on a 
command line, you're set for years of fun.  You learn that you can fix 
anything with an ssh session and vi.

Learning how to use find was the next most useful thing.

All these distros adding on pretty GUI's and things to do all this stuff 
for you just make it harder for the newbie to really figure out what's 
really going on under the hood. 

It may get them up and running faster at the beginning, so they can 
claim that they're "Linux users", but as soon as something goes wrong, 
they're dead in the water, frustrated, and venting all over those of us 
who ignore the GUI's and do our own configuration after reading the man 
page.

Nate