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Me, myself, and Irenne
Me, myself, and Irenne

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Linux Power

After final deciding, due to health issues, I decided to remake myself. I was a big gamer when younger and built my own desktops, however I never really journeyed further into computers other than the necessary things to get a game to run well.

In my time of thinking "what can I do next", I thought to myself. Why don't I learn more about computers, in particular programming, it was always an interest in my life, so I began my transition to a new career. My first thoughts were "well, I can't afford to do a computer science at university.", and thus the search began.

Firstly, the options for learning programming, both high and low level, are abundant and with the development of data mining, machine learning, IoT and AI bombarding search engine, it is truly hard to find what you want you need. And I mean literally "it is hard finding exactly what you need to succeed". In fact on reflection it has been a battle to get vaguely where I am, and still a while off my target of being employable as a programmer.

What becomes apparent, A lot of programs solutions are offered under MIT or GNU licencing restrictions. There is nothing ordinarily written in just a straight .py file. On top of this, writers are generally offering support for Ios or Linux.

Unable to afford the luxury of a Apple computer, that is in my opinion but if you have a spare $1000 + than you don't need to read this, Yes, over priced. I started to look into the Linux distributions and yes it hasn't been easy. Yet in doing so I found a community that is sometime negative but on the whole, Linux people are very diligent and helping towards helping you learn the system. Strange thing is most of these people do this as a service for free. I find this astounding. It is certainly changing, but for service price, it is very reasonable on a small budget.

If you'd love to know more about Linux and want to understand more:

https://www.linux.org/

Linux comes in many different flavours. Being opened sourced, many of the Linux systems have been developed to suit both the style of the writers and the community backing them. Knowing which one to choose can often come down to aesthetics and layout of the operating system. One thing they all have in common is the use of Terminal - This is where the Power is really at!

Linux org has a beginners guide to understanding this more and extremely helpful crew. However, most of your learning of terminal commands to do "something" can be achieved by searching the internet.

Recommendations at first:

Don't be over concerned about which Linux distro to use. In saying that go for a well supported ones like Ubuntu, Mint or Debian. Systems like Arch Linux are extremely difficult for a person starting out. It was made really for professional, same as I think Red Hat, but I haven't an experience with the latter.

https://www.ubuntu.com/

https://www.linuxmint.com/

Stick with one of these two and you should be fine. Has a lot of GUI and better community behind them so you won't have problems finding what you need.

Next major thing. Don't even both trying to dual boot it with Windows. If possible have a second machine that runs Linux. Alternatively, run it over top of Windows if you must using virtual machines. Main reason I have it on separate computer is that many of the programming I'm learning requires dependencies to run and nothing worse that wanting to get stuck into coding and having to download files.

I will next talk about python and my journey

Ps sorry for editing it so much. If you have any experience with Linux and want to share, I'd love to hear about it. :) happy coding

Top comments (7)

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louissaglio profile image
Louis-Saglio

I don't know why Archlinux is said difficult to use. I am using it from 2 month and I still don't have any problem with it. And I am not a Linux expert. I had once a problem with Pacman (the package manager) who couldn't solve dependancies with a few Python packages, I just had to uninstall them manually to make it work.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

cool, glad it's working fine for you :). When I can afford another machine, I will try it. Cheers tc

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dwipr profile image
Dwi purnomo

the difficult moment is when my Linux fail to boot (usually after installing update), it just hang with no message. that is why i make my computer dual boot, one is for backup and access internet for help when i encounter boot failure.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne • Edited

I had no success with dual booting, whether that is because I run a laptop with SSD. Even if I partition the drive to separate the operating system, Ubuntu just doesn't seem to see the other op sys and have had issue boot fail due to swap drive issues.

Ideally, I believe it would only be benificial if I had at least one other computer to fall back on. The pi is a horrible option cause I mainly Ssh or use VCU viewer to access. Again that's through my main computer. Anyway, just thinking out loud, maybe once I finish my next project, I'll check it out again with Arch instead.

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sndpwrites profile image
Sandeep Neupane

Dual-booting is not really as scary as it sounds. It's a pretty straightforward process to get the most out of your machine.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

Im,sorry but most documentation on dual boot Linux windows are deprecated and machine based. The worse part is i want to say to us "go get fucked" it wasn't straight forward. How do you decide what's easy.

Make a thread about it, show me how easy it is for you. All I need to do is look at the steps you tried, and then I will know what I also tried.

It worked for you, how about helping others instead of being "show off" by telling it is easy. That statement above Sandeep is a nothing statement and personally I am offended that you come on my post with out an actual proof than you managed to dual boot it on your machines and somehow I am a noob for not being able to do it.

I am honestly refraining from swearing at you.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

Look in all honesty, my reply was not necessary, I was having a bad day but that is no reason to take my frustrations out on you. I think I figured out why I have had bad luck is windows 7 is biosed on my machine and the linux distro was uefi. I am sorry, I was so mean.