this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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You're welcome!
One of the things that is almost universally true of FOSS software is that the documentation is usually really good. In addition to the talented developers there are a lot of talent technical writers who donate their time to maintaining wikis and documentation.
The man (manual) pages are also really useful (type 'man ls' or 'man systemctl') and most projects include man pages for their man commands. man systemctl:
Another helpful tool to install is tldr. Instead of showing you the manual, it'll show you a page which includes a brief list of the most common use cases for that command and explainations.
tldr systemctl:
Don't feel like you need to read these things like a novel, just know that they're there so when you have a problem or want to try to customize your system in some way you will have a source to turn to.
Also, since you're really new you're likely to stumble into vim and get trapped. It's a text editor with a unique way of interacting with the text due to it being a terminal application. This style of input is often mirrored in other things. man pages use vim-like keybindings, for example. Once again, Fireship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txKSRn0qeA
Learning vim completely is it's own project, but at least be familiar enough with it that you can open a document, navigate around, make changes and save/close the document. There's tons of videos on the topic (and cheatsheets for the more advanced vim motions, just do an image search).
Good luck! :D