michalrz
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2012
- Messages
- 4,332
Wow, I think the last time people got so interested in Linux/BSD/whatever based systems was when Vista came out and Microsoft nuked pirated XP copies.
If you guys are thinking about this, don't bother yourselves with overt concern as to which one to choose.
In the end you'll be using a desktop environment, just like Windows, and a set of drivers bundled with the Linux kernel that is quite similarly prepared among distributions.
Stay away from "learning Linux" by installing LFS, Slackware, Gentoo. There's no 'Linux' for ordinary users to learn.
There's usually the bash shell, an equivalent to 'cmd', and a toolkit of various little programs like grep, find, less, nano, htop, tar, gzip.
The popular distros usually get the most attention and thus devs have an opportunity to weed out bugs and add features. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian are some of the ones I used and they were all okay.
KateOS was IMHO one of the best and most promising distros and I used it most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KateOS
The most important thing I guess would be to learn to recognize your hardware and move around.
Some random tips off the top of my head:
-You need to check if your HDD is detected as, for example, /dev/sda or /dev/sdb,
- you need to know that fdisk -l will show you your HDD's partition scheme and recognized partitions.
- if the VGA driver fails during boot-up you can use ctrl+alt+F<1-6> to open up a shell. Console no. 7 is usually the GUI
- ifconfig -a will list your network interfaces, the main interface is usually labeled 'eth0' (eth-ethernet), WiFi is usually wlan0. (wireless Lan)
- most importantly - choose a desktop environment beforehand. Look at some screenshots, see if they appeal. I've tried Xfce, KDE3, KDE4 and Gnome. For me, Gnome is a nightmare to work with but it's often default. I liked KDE3 most, KDE4 is what I use.
If you guys are thinking about this, don't bother yourselves with overt concern as to which one to choose.
In the end you'll be using a desktop environment, just like Windows, and a set of drivers bundled with the Linux kernel that is quite similarly prepared among distributions.
Stay away from "learning Linux" by installing LFS, Slackware, Gentoo. There's no 'Linux' for ordinary users to learn.
There's usually the bash shell, an equivalent to 'cmd', and a toolkit of various little programs like grep, find, less, nano, htop, tar, gzip.
The popular distros usually get the most attention and thus devs have an opportunity to weed out bugs and add features. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian are some of the ones I used and they were all okay.
KateOS was IMHO one of the best and most promising distros and I used it most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KateOS
The most important thing I guess would be to learn to recognize your hardware and move around.
Some random tips off the top of my head:
-You need to check if your HDD is detected as, for example, /dev/sda or /dev/sdb,
- you need to know that fdisk -l will show you your HDD's partition scheme and recognized partitions.
- if the VGA driver fails during boot-up you can use ctrl+alt+F<1-6> to open up a shell. Console no. 7 is usually the GUI
- ifconfig -a will list your network interfaces, the main interface is usually labeled 'eth0' (eth-ethernet), WiFi is usually wlan0. (wireless Lan)
- most importantly - choose a desktop environment beforehand. Look at some screenshots, see if they appeal. I've tried Xfce, KDE3, KDE4 and Gnome. For me, Gnome is a nightmare to work with but it's often default. I liked KDE3 most, KDE4 is what I use.