I just installed Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (Cinnamon) on an empty laptop a couple days ago and have been experimenting a lot. I’m coming from being a Windows user since I was just a little kid playing old DOS games on my grandpa’s Win-98 PC back in around 2000. My daily driver is currently running Windows 10 but I am pretty adamant on not going with Win-11. I’ve been wanting to experiment with Linux for a while and Cinnamon so far seems like a lot of fun to navigate. Terminal is amazing. The fact that you can custom-write keyboard commands that can be hand-tailored to individual programs on your computer via the OS… that’s powerful.
I have not tried running WINE yet but I plan on doing so soon. I also have not done much of anything, honestly, except for learning how to search for programs with gnome-software --search=. I have also used sudo a couple times to download software here and there, but I know I am not tackling this in as systematic of a way as I ought to be to really figure this machine out.
What are some really important basic commands I can use to start branching out into Terminal command structures and learning more about how I can edit and customize my computer? And if Cinnamon has shortfalls or weaknesses that I may run into eventually, what are some good alternative distros that I could leapfrog to eventually? I do not have any coding experience (currently), but I do consider myself a semi-power-user on Windows, having messed with CMD many times and digging through all the damn menus to access drivers and alter ports.
If you’re typing out a long file path in the terminal you don’t have to type the whole thing out, you can just press tab and it’ll autocomplete for you.
So for example, if your file is called 1234567890.jpg you can just type 123 and hit tab and it’ll fill in the rest. And if there’s more than one file that begins with 123 it’ll list them. Works for folder names too.
Rather than Ubuntu Cinnamon, you’d be better off with Linux Mint.
Not very practical, but good for understanding the OS: Everything is a file. Even your filesystem and harddrive is represented by a file (devicenode).
Back in the day, before things such as pulseaudio and equivalents became the norm, there was also such a file (it might still exist, idk) for your soundcard. By shoving the contents of a wav file directly into /dev/dsp, you could hear it as if it was played normally.
Unrelates to the above, in a terminal context it’s very handy to learn the concepts of STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR, and how to manipulate these. I won’t go into it here, but whenever you see a bunch of commands strung together with redirects, < > | >>, that’s usually for sending the output (STDOUT) of one command somewhere else, such as to the input STDIN to another command.
I think the two “major tips” that I can give you are simply
1- Package manager is your best friend.
2- Figure out the “know-hows” of Linux (i.e who “is responsible” for the video card, who deals with the cpu, how do i configure my sound card, how do i configure my video card, etc.).
Master those two tips and you can call yourself an average linux user.
The Linux community is indeed remarkable, but the multitude of available distributions can sometimes give an impression of fragmentation. When you discover the distribution that best fits your needs, it’s important to remember not to take it personally. Avoid developing a bias towards your chosen distribution as it could potentially lead to unnecessary conflicts with others who prefer different distributions within the community.
