this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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What sort of things are you having problems with?
Most of us learned by being curious and poking around, reading on Google or asking our friends who use Linux. If you don't have friends who use Linux the community is also great, asking in forums such as this one will likely get you answers and explanations for things. Pop is based on Debian, Ubuntu is also based on Debian, so most things that apply to one apply to the other, in fact the vast majority of things that apply to one Linux apply to most of not all, which is why a lot of people look to the Arch Linux wiki for answers even if they don't use Arch themselves.
You will break things, consider this a fact because it will happen, Linux gives you too much access, so if you don't know what you're doing you might shoot yourself in the foot, but that's fine because you would have learnt something important in the process.
So if you're going to break things, how can we make it easier for you to recover? On Linux different drives or partitions don't show up as different letters on the "my computer" like they do on Windows, instead they need to be mounted onto a folder. This means that you can have folder A and folder B side by side but both being in different drives inside a folder C that is in yet another drive. That sounds confusing, but we can use this to our advantage, the root of the Linux filesystem is
/
everything is inside that folder, so for example the full path to your user directly is/home/
whereas the full path to the Firefox binary (which you can check by runningwhich firefox
on a terminal) is something like/bin/firefox
. When you're installing a system you can partition the disk (or if you have multiple disks) and select each one of them to mount in a different place on boot, to do that on most installers you need to select manual partitioning or something like that, then you select one partition of at least 100GB (you can do a lot less for testing on your VM, this is my recommendation for your actual system) to be mounted on/
, then you select a partition of at least the same amount as your RAM to be swap (swap is essentially a RAM in disk, this is used when you run out of RAM, or when you want to hybernate), and finally the remaining space you put to mount on/home
. Remember how I said your user home directory was inside/home
? So that means that now your user home directory is in a separate partition from the system, but why would you want that? Simple, because now if you break your system, or want to reinstall it for whatever reason, you'll only format the partition you used for/
, leaving the one on/home
untouched, which means that all of your personal files, configurations, etc get preserved. You'll only lose the system, programs installed, and other such things which are easily recoverable. If you do this, the worst case scenario for your curiosity is around half an hour of reinstalling the system before you're back to where you started without losing anything important.