raubarno 🇱🇹

Unfortunately, Linux manuals are pretty scattered around. I’ll try to find something for you:

• If you want to learn the very basics of Linux command line, here’s what I found on the web: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/ ;
• For on how to use GNU user-land tools (Bash, cat, less, grep, sed, etc.), I recommend the GNU manuals which are very well-written: https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html (example: Bash manual);
  • GNU manuals are also downloaded for offline read by default. These manuals are provided with info.
• For GUI desktop, it depends on what Desktop Environment (DE) you use:
  • KDE wiki with tutorials: https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials
  • GNOME app overview with documentation: https://apps.gnome.org/
  • If you don’t know what DE you use, KDE uses sharp edges for windows and GNOME uses round edges ( 👁️👄👁️ ).
• For system, as @Terumo@lemmy.world pointed out, for system-specific stuff, there’s ArchWiki that has topics about everything.
• If you want to understand what are the /usr, /usr/local, /etc, /dev, etc. filesystem directories, you want to look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html
• There is also a free training course for Linux: https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/
• If you’re a developer and want to find out how deep the rabbit hole is, you may want to look at an online book Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

EDIT: Forgot this important material:

• If you need to know command-line argument specifics for a particular program, use manpages (For example, to find brief information about grep, type man grep in your shell, and info grep if you need a complete manual).

Hi. I understand your rant. Yes, the quality of most frameworks in the wild is pretty low, especially if it is one of the more niche algorithm nobody takes care to audit, or the programming language lacks safety syntax, like C++, which allows writing mixed C and C++ code and only few people understand the necessity of idiomatic C++. And of course, inexperienced devs go the easiest way.

Don’t give up and take this as a challenge. It is a skill to understand what the other guy wrote. And this skill takes years to develop.

You can try to enroll into Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin course. It is quite a respectable certification. Try to have some practice every day as well.

I’d recommend rather boring Debian. Archlinux as well if you want to dive deeper.

EDIT: For Debian, you want Debian Testing.

I got used to XFCE, but, with my new awesome Tuxedo laptop, I got KDE as a DE for a stock OS, and I could say it feels much more complete. But the performance drops, when opening a terminal, for example.

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- enters the chat

Gun/Linux 🔫

Yes, there are.

As the others made a good point, Linux is the kernel (program that connects hardware altogether and manages processes). GNU is an organisation beginning in 1983 that made some vital userland programs (Bash, GCC, readline, GNOME, GTK, GIMP, etc.) as a replacement of the proprietary ones found in UNIX and Windows. Linux is created by a Finnish student Linus Torvalds and is not a part of the GNU project but it’s been licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the first free software license.

Linux is used by a lot of companies, and some of the products that have Linux inside refuse to accept the paradigm of software freedom. Examples of this are: Chrome OS, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Google Android and some (but not all) appliances (like routers) that are locked-in and contain proprietary blobs.

Therefore, in technical discussions, I use the word “Linux” to refer to the OS, as “this software is compatible with Linux”. But, when I want to stress out software freedom, given a large influence of the GNU project, I say “GNU/Linux”.

I used to use Arch Linux. It’s really good, honestly, especially if you want to know how the OS components work from inside or make something custom. For anything else, I would recommend Debian and its non-snap-based derivatives (Linux Mint Debian Edition or Tuxedo OS, or KDE Neon).

IDK, I used to have a dedicated software for playing with CUDA. Most of the image-specific AI stuff from the internet require 8 GB of VRAM or more, though.

Nowadays, I don’t feel the need for GPU-accelerated computing, though. If I needed, I would write Vulkan compute shaders for that thing.

There are programs (LyX, TexMacs) that implement WYSIWYG for LaTeX, TexMacs is exceptionally good. I don’t know about the standards, though.

Another problem with LaTeX and most of the other document formats is that they are so bloated and depend on many other tasks that it is hardly possible to embed the tool into a larger document. That’s a bit of criticism for UNIX design philosophy, as well. And LaTeX code is especially hard to make portable.

There used to be a similar situation with PDFs, it was really hard to display a PDF embedded in application. Finally, Firefox pdf.js came in and solved that issue.

The only embedded and easy-to-implement standard that describes a ‘document’ is HTML, for now (with Javascript for scripting). Only that it’s not aware of page layout. If only there’s an extension standard that could make a HTML page into a document…

Gzip is slower and outputs larger compression ratio. Zstandard, on the other hand, is terribly faster than any of the existing standards in means of compression speed, this is its killer feature. Also, it provides a bit better compression ratio than gzip ^{citation_needed}.

Yes, but only if everyone adhere to CommonMark version of Markdown.

Markdown, CommonMark, .rst formats are good for printing basic rich text for technical documentation and so on, when text styling is made by an external application and you don’t care about reproducible layout.

But you also want to make custom styles (font size, text alignment, colours), page layout (paper format, margin size, etc.) and make sure your document is reproducible across multiple processing applications, that the layout doesn’t break, authoring tools, maybe even some version control, etc. This is when it strikes you bad.

Open Document Standard (.odt) for all documents. In all public institutions (it’s already a NATO standard for documents).

Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.

Actually, IMHO, there should be some better alternative to .odt as well. Something more out of a declarative/scripted fashion like LaTeX but still WYSIWYG. LaTeX (and XeTeX, for my use cases) is too messy for me to work with, especially when a package is Byzantine. And it can be non-reproducible if I share/reuse the same document somewhere else.

Something has to be made with document files.

Software was not meant to be someone’s ‘property’ that can be bought or sold. Everyone has a right to free download, modify and share, that’s the point of GNU and Linux.

Oops. I thought lemm.ee is Lemmy for Estonians.

Okay, maybe Lithuanian will explain better to an Estonian:

Once in the 19th century there was a rapid industrialization. Farmers and citizen guild-workers lost their economical value and had to turn into factory workers. At that time, there was massive unemployment, and factory owners were unregulated. Then a philosopher Karl Marx went in, and started to analyse. He concluded that, in history, it’s always ‘slaves vs landowners’, then ‘peasants vs seniors’, and ultimately ‘workers vs enterprise owners (bourgeoisie)’. He named this phenomenon ‘class struggle’, and hypothesised that, after workers will defeat bourgeoisie, then it would be possible to create a perfect egalitarian society with no exploitation, in which people have all the rights except the right to be rich. That was called ‘Communism’, a proposed ideal society.

His ideas attracted many followers, which were split into several political campus, for instance, Socialist democracy (‘mild’ socialism, rich people pay more taxes, etc.), Anarcho-Communism (no state, no regulations, lived only for a short period of time in Ukraine), and many more.

Then V. Lenin came in, and told there must be a ‘peasants’ revolution’ that abolishes the existing state(s), kill all the enemies of that revolution, become a Socialist country (ie. State controls all the economy) and then slowly progress into Communism. His practices were furthermore refined by Stalin and were called ‘Marxism-Leninism’. History of the USSR shows that the power of a Socialist state can be used to create a totalitarian prison.

So ‘Communism’ can mean either an egalitarian society or heading towards that direction, basically.

Celestia (the planetarium) from early 2000s also runs on modern Linux just fine