. When software is fully Free (as in "free speech"), these kinds of things don't happen.Some notes about Linux, aimed largely at beginners who currently use Windows.
directory: slightly old-fashioned word for folder.
superuser, root, sudo: this is like "run as administrator" on Windows.
terminal, terminal emulator, console, shell, commandline: these sort of all refer to the same thing. See below.
In fact, proprietary software sucks in general and
here are numerous reasons why
. When software is fully Free (as in "free speech"), these kinds of things don't happen.
Make a list of the software you use on a daily basis. Is it open source? Is it available for Linux? Are there free alternatives available? If the free alternative is available for Windows, first try it out!
For jegus sake, stop using Adobe software. Swap Microslop Office for LibreOffice. Perhaps you use Google Docs or whatever - that will still work, but I'd recommend using something that works offline.
You may have bought a load of games on Steam. (by the way, Steam also somewhat sucks and I would recommend buying any new games from Itch.io or GOG.com if possible). Windows games will mostly run fine on Linux through Proton. To check compatability reviews, go to
ProtonDB
. If you have Windows games from elsewhere, you can probably run them using
Wine
.
Live USB. A lot of distros (shor for distributions - different "versions" of the Linux operating system) allow you to install them to a USB stick so you can try it out without messing up your existing OS. But in the long term, you will probably want to install it on your hard drive. There are two main options:
Dual boot. This is where you keep your installation of Windows and also install Linux on the same computer. This is what I and many people initially did. There are plenty of guides online for how to do this. If your job depends on "League of Legends" (btw Arcane was a great show I loved it! Vi and her sister/rival Emacs are so iconic) or Adobe software, this is definitely what you'll want to do.
Single boot. Wipe the Windows installation from your drive, and install Linux instead. You will want to have backed up ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING before you do this. I assume you're using a laptop in the year 2026 CE, but if you're using a PC, you can also remove your hard drive which Windows on it, stick in a blank one, and install Linux to that (you can also do this with a laptop but it will be trickier).
PICK A DISTRO. There are lots of different distributions to choose from and they all come with slightly different software and configurations. Ones people often start with include Linux Mint, Kubuntu, Fedora, and Ubuntu. I started with Ubuntu, but I would personally suggest Linux Mint.
DON'T PICK AN "ADVANCED" OR "ALTERNATIVE" DISTRO. Don't start on Arch - if you're a novice, you should pick one that's aimed at novices and comes with a decent amount of preinstalled software. Don't start on Alpine or Void or Chimera - if you're a novice, you should use one that behaves "normally". Most people online expect your distro has systemd (as init system), glibc (as C library), sudo (for privelege elevation) and GNU coreutils (as userland). You don't need to know what these things are just yet. Most distros that differ from these will make it obvious on their website. Once you know more about Linux, feel free to use whatever you like (I currently run Void, which uses runit as init system).
ACTUALLY YOU CAN START WITH AN "ADVANCED" OR "ALTERNATIVE" DISTRO. If you want to properly learn how your computer works on a deeper level, then go ahead. Do plenty of research so you know what you're getting into. Be prepared to read the documentation; quite often it's pretty good.
Let's face it, you will eventually need to look for help online. If you ask questions, here are some things people may want to know about your installation:
WHAT DISTRO ARE YOU ON? I explained vaguely what a distro is in the previous section. This is important to know because different distros may come with different desktop environments and package managers.
DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT. This is the software that provides the application menu, taskbar, window management, etc.. Popular ones are KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and COSMIC. Desktop environments are currently in transition from the old X11 protocol to the newer Wayland; you may need
THE TERMINAL. This is where you enter commands for doing things like installing software and configuring various things. See the section below.
PACKAGE MANAGER. A program that you run in the terminal to install and update software. Many distributions also provide graphical software for this, such as KDE Discover or GNOME Software; however, many people prefer the command-line package manager.
The terminal (AKA the commandline, AKA the console, AKA the shell)[1] is a text-based environment where you run commands. It's a ancient part of the operating system that has been present since the earliest days of UNIX. Some people will tell you that, these days, normal users can get away without ever touching the terminal; however, most users will eventually need to use it at some point, so it's a good idea to get comfortable with it.
Using the terminal, you can run commands to do all sorts of things with your computer, including managing files & directories (AKA folders), converting between different filetypes, downloading files from the web, and launching applications. There are also fairly advanced programs that can run entirely inside a terminal, including text editors ("nano", "vim", etc.), file managers ("lf", "ranger", "nnn", etc.) and even simple web browsers ("links", "offpunk", etc.). There also lots of silly commands (such as "cowsay" and "sl") and terminal-based games (such as NetHack, Cataclysm DDA, chess-tui, and others).
To open a terminal, go to the applications menu and select "terminal" or whatever. Most desktop environments will provide the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+t to open a terminal. Some use the shortcut Windows+t or Windows+Enter instead. (Note - since we're not using Windows, it's a bit silly to call this the "Windows" key, so often people will call it "Super". I like to call it "Greggs".)
Try out a few commands! The following ones are harmless and won't change any files or anything (type them out and press Enter to run them):
whoami displays your username.pwd displays the "current working directory".ls (short for "list") lists the files in the current working directory.man command will display a help page for the specified command (e.g. man ls for help on the "ls" command) - you can use arrow keys to scroll and "q" to quit.firefox will start the Firefox web browser, if it's installed.exit quits the terminal.I will not be writing a full introduction to the terminal, as many other people have done this before.
You can the up/down arrow keys to show previous commands and run them again. In most terminals, you can select text with the mouse and copy it with Ctrl+Shift+C (or through the right-click menu). To paste text in the command line, do Ctrl+Shift+V.
When people give you commands to run, it is standard practice to format them as follows:
$ chmod u+x filename - a dollar sign "$" means run with normal priveleges. Copy everything to the right of the dollar sign and paste it in your terminal.# chmod u+x filename - a hash sign "#" means run with superuser (root) priveleges. Typing "sudo" before a command makes it run with superuser priveleges. In this example, you would type sudo chmod u+x filename. Note that most commands do not need to be run with root priveleges, and you should avoid running things as root unless it's necessary (as a basic security principle). You should almost never run a program downloaded from the internet as root.TODO basics of environment variables so you know what they are when they come up
Linux is one of several "Unix-like" operating systems.
Hackers
love using these, as they provide lots of fun toys for them to play with. If you're into programming for fun, you'll have even more fun on a Unix-like! (Of course, you don't have to be into programming at all to use Linux)
There are lots of useful things to know about managing a Linux operating system. Here are a few things you might want to know, and I would expect any "advanced" user to know (at the absolute minimum) all the things in bold:
"Knowing" how to do any of these things doesn't mean knowing how to do it all from your own memory - it's fine to have to look things up every now and then. What it does mean is you need to understand what you're doing and how seriously you can mess everything up. When you do have to look things up, I would suggest the following resources:
are
some
examples
of
what
this
may
look
like
)
's for example)
command, which provides crowd-sourced cheatsheets and lets you edit your own.When you know how to do some of the things listed above, you can switch to a more advanced distribution, or even a BSD.
Void is pretty cool. Chimera is even cooler but I haven't properly tried it yet. I don't really like Arch, but it's very popular.
[1] Technically, these are slightly different things. The terminal (or console) in a strict sense refers to the full-screen text-based console you get when pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2/F3/etc. Strictly speaking, the application you'll be typing commands in is a terminal emulator, and there are lots of different terminal emulators available, often made for a specific desktop environment; however most people will just call it a "terminal". A commandline is any interface where you type commands, but the commandline most often refers to "the terminal". The shell usually refers to the program "sh" or "bash" or "fish" or "zsh" that provides the command-line interface in the terminal; this is a separate program from the terminal emulator itself.
