this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
57 points (81.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35807 readers
1886 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm a 20yo, Hella Autistic, ADHD-riddled spaz that likes to tinker with programs and software settings alot. I'm building a pc for the first time right now, and while I am tech savvy; or more tech savvy than most; coding, programming, tech engineering is complete and utter gibberish, and it seems like the only people that use Linux are HEAVILY experienced with those things I just listed... HOWEVER... I'm not. I just like digging around various program settings or messing with things, or personalizing them as much as I can.

The more I delve into tech or tech related spaces; whether its through building my pc or just- using this website; the more people wont stop yapping about "OOH LINUX, I LOOOVE LINUX." and every time I ask about it and why I should use it, they make it out like its an absolute godsend piece of technology (im sure it is tbh... it does look nice)

But then looking into it myself, all I see is a bunch of technical word vomit that makes no god damn sense to me. and the more I ask for people to explain this to me, the worse my confusion becomes. now I'm learning there's like 40 different "Distro's"... Someone else told me about Linux Mint, which looks nice, but again- I DO NOT want to be forced to use a terminal just to get the most outta my operating system. I like having some kind of UI to use.

idk man... from everything they say I can do with it, ESPECIALLY in terms of customization, I'm so tempted to use it. But my mental understanding of whatever tf Linux is, is at best a toddler's.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The reason why people talk so much about the terminal is:

  1. It's easier to tell newbies "input this command" than to guide them through a GUI.
  2. The terminal gives you a lot of flexibility to customise stuff.

You'll probably want to learn the terminal for any serious customisation. However, you don't need to deal with it in your everyday usage.

I'd suggest you to use a Live USB, like other users recommended. Linux Mint, plus plenty other distros, can run straight from the USB. It'll be better for you to judge if you could/should be using Linux this way.

About the thousand distros, most of them don't matter. And if you're a newbie, stick to Mint and you'll probably not regret it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I will add onto this, that you don't need to be a programmer or understand how everything works to use the terminal. At first, it's fine to copy the commands directly into the terminal without really knowing how it all works.

I would very highly suggest to be careful about doing this blindly, you can and will compromise or Bork your system doing this too haphazardly. But it's fine to learn it piece by piece, looking at what commands do as you go to use them. Treat every command you copy paste into the terminal the same way you would treat a .exe file you download from the internet on Windows.

As you use the terminal more frequently, you'll being to recognize different commands and what they do. You'll even start figuring out shortcuts or variations of commands and variables that align more with how you use the computer and what you're hoping the output to give you.

Linux Mint is a great place to play with this, because most everything has a GUI counterpart so you can see the difference between doing the same task with a GUI vs using the terminal. It is also able to live-boot from a USB, as others have pointed out, so you don't need to worry about ruining your primary computer experience. I'd suggest trying this out before you build your new computer, just to see what it's like.