this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2022
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The Linux Experiment

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I'm Nick, and I like to tinker with Linux stuff. I'll bumble through distro reviews, tutorials, and general helpful tidbits and impressions on Linux desktop environments, applications, and news. You might see a bit of Linux gaming here and there, and some more personal opinion pieces, but in the end, it's more or less all about Linux and FOSS ! If you want to stay up to snuff, follow me on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP If you can, consider supporting the channel here: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment

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#linux #mistake

00:00 Intro 00:42 Sponsor: Get a free study on the best open source practices 01:47 Using Linux without the internet 04:19 Not using a separate /home partition 05:57 Not distro hopping soon enough 07:49 Not getting out of my comfort zone 09:20 Dual booting for too long 11:18 Fearing the terminal 13:06 And a lot more! 14:07 Sponsor: Get a laptop or desktop running Linux from Tuxedo 15:13 Support the channel

So, when I started using Linux, it was on an old refurbished laptop that didn't have wifi or an ethernet port. I had to download packages from the repos. Manually. And copy them to a USB key, transfer them to the laptop, copy them there, install them, only for DPKG to tell me that dependencies were missing.

So, yeah, using Linux without access to the internet. Completely unusable unless you're already perfectly setup and you don't need anything else.

Second mistake I took way too long to correct was NOT setting up a separate /home partition. See, you can reinstall a whole other Linux distro and reuse that exact same /home partition to keep all your settings, files, configurations and more, and avoid losing hours setting everything up again.

Nowadays, distros generally also don't default to a separate /home partition, which is a mistake in my opinion.

Another mistake I made: I didn't distro hop enough when I started using Linux

This might seem weird, but the diversity of Linux distros and what they offer is undeniably the greatest strength of our ecosystem.

Distro hopping is how you learn about all the various things you can do on Linux. It's how you try other desktop environments, and it's how you learn what the differences are, what the advantages of each distro, each system are. Not distro hopping sooner meant that I just didn't learn anything new while using Linux, for a long time.

In the same vein, I also put off trying out new projects for a long time! Flatpak, Wayland, image based Operating systems like SIlverblue, GNOME extensions, I used to stay safe in my little comfort zone, and I judged everything else by the standards of what someone else had written online.

Not trying out these projects for myself also stunted my learning experience, and while I can absolutely agree that none of them are perfect, even today, they taught me so much about how things work, whether it's the older way, or the new ways these projects bring, I now know a lot more about the inner workings of my system and how to fix problems when I encounter them.

Another mistake, that will be more personal, is dual booting for too long. I kept a Windows system on my devices for a long, long while, up until I started this channel, actually, in 2018. I used Windows as a crutch: when something didn't work immediately on Linux, I just rebooted on Windows, did the thing, and then stuck to Windows for the day, because rebooting was annoying. And then the next day, I still used Windows, because I knew I had something to do that I already knew how to do on Windows.

And so, I didn't learn how to do a lot of things on Linux, even though it would have saved me time in the end.

Another big mistake I made back in the day, was avoiding the command line. It's a wonderfully powerful tool to get tings done. Updating your software repos and installing multiple apps at once is just more convenient from the command line. Fixing an error is also way faster this way, or transcoding a video using ffmpeg

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