
Ask HN: How to Master Linux? - leeshire
I&#x27;ve changed my pc into a Ubuntu machine.
what are some resources to get into the world of linux and master it from begining?<p>I like it more than windows but want to learn more about it including the terminal.<p>which distro should I go with between Debian and Ubuntu? 
I&#x27;m also in the process of learning web development and computer science so I figured linux is a good machine for it.
======
svennek
First of all, the distro you use doesn't really matter that much in the end.

Two distros you definitely should not use from the beginning are Arch and
Gentoo. Both are great distros, but way to complex for a beginner.

As a beginner be sure to take one of the popular ones, so that you have a
large array of packages and help (forums, wikis and such).

Also, consider installing some of the others as virtual machines on your
computer. So that you can try the different things on different distros
without reinstalling all the time.

Consider having one of the following your daily driver and the others in vms:

\- Ubuntu or debian (both debian family)

\- Centos or fedora (both redhat family)

\- Manjaro (arch family)

You could also add SuSE and Slackware (both their own families)

Use the machine as your daily driver and accept that mastery is a journey and
it takes (a long) time.

Getting good at the terminal merely requires two things, first you must decide
to use it often, and secondly time where you are using it must pass..

------
mixmastamyk
Distro doesn’t matter much to be honest. The problem is that this question
covers a wide number of fields.

The art of unix programming is a good book to get your bearings:
[http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/](http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/)

Then learn a shell like bash, zsh, or fish thoroughly. A scripting language
like Python can’t hurt. Building a custom kernel and toolchain is a fun
process as well.

That’s plenty to get started. Good luck. ;-)

~~~
CyberFonic
The "Unix Philosophy" section is solid gold. With those principles in mind
many other aspects suddenly make sense. Might be a good idea to keep that page
bookmarked and return back to it, often.

------
CyberFonic
I'm sure you'll get lots of conflicting advice. There really is no high road
that's better than the others.

Although I've been using variations of Unix since Version 5 running on a
PDP-11/45, I use an Ubuntu desktop system for everyday use. Simple because it
is easy to keep up to date and works well both as a graphical environment and
with the terminal. My setup includes 2 LCDs in landscape mode for graphical
apps and a third LCD in portrait mode exclusively as a terminal with lots of
open tabs.

As for getting started, have a look at [https://www.lifewire.com/beginners-
guide-to-linux-4090233](https://www.lifewire.com/beginners-guide-to-
linux-4090233). Then you just need to frequently refer to the man pages and
the many other guides you will find with Google.
[https://unix.stackexchange.com/](https://unix.stackexchange.com/) provides
reasonably high quality answers to many common and not so common questions.

I recommend that you learn to use terminal commands well. As a pro tip, if you
are using 'vi', CTRL-] is the same as ESC. When you get used to using that
your speed will increase significantly. Oh, and remap the CAPS-LOCK key to be
a CTRL key. You don't want to get RSI in your left pinkie.

------
NotZachari
Distro wise, I'd probably go Ubuntu simply because it's the most "mainstream
ready" option. There's not much you run into that is not going to play nice
with it compared to a lot of distros. It also takes a lot of pain out of the
swap out of the switch at times due to that.

Honestly, the best advice I can give is to just use it as you would any other
OS. It seems like common sense advice, but you really pick up a lot just by
treating as if that's all you have to work with. The most important thing is
to master the terminal. Once you know the basics, you're set. At this point,
swapping to Linux has never been easier so you won't run into as many
compatibility issues and whatnot like you would have a decade or so ago.

Explore. You're trying something new. There's no correct answer here. It's
like picking a main in SSB. Tier levels don't mean shit if you hate who you're
playing with. Figure out how to survive if you were left with only the
terminal, and you'll be fine.

------
Yaa101
Most important is to know where your "stuff" is. Learn how the filesystem on
your disks are built up. Try to use the terminal as there is the hidden world
of linux capabilities, often commandline programs are very efficient, they
save you a lot of mouse movements and clicks. Install mc to help you within
the terminal.

~~~
leeshire
interesting you mention filesystems earlier my pc was saying /dev/sda2
contains a file system with errors.

I googled and did fsck I think and some other code fixed the problem but don't
actually know what happened just google helped me fix it.

