Man is great to check quickly what something does. I use atuin as my shell history to make it a lot easier to search

How often do you need commands you cant remember? The ones i use are typically memorized via regular use, or i just look it up for the one off ones. You can use some distros without ever touching the terminal too if thats what you prefer.

Here is my personal approach to this.

• I have set my bash history to a ridiculous 1000000 max length, so that I can use CTRL+R to search for commands that I have ran before

• I write down a lot of commands in a searchable note text document

• Ask chatGPT

• Added some verbose custom aliases and scripts. For example instead of

inotifywait -m -r --exclude “(/tmp.*|/var/cache.*|/dev/pts/|/var/log.*)” -e MOVED_TO -e CREATE -e CLOSE_WRITE -e DELETE -e MODIFY . (nobody can remember that alphabet gibberish)

I just type watch_this_dir_for_changes

Idea 1:

Print out some of the various CLI cheat sheets and pin them to your wall by where you work on your computer.

Maybe print this one: pbs.twimg.com/media/GSRHsvRWIAAtBX0.jpg🌥

Then, print a with commands you commonly use, either with more complex syntax or that aren’t on the sheet. (Like, “ls” is on there, but “ls -s -h” is not, for example.

Idea 2:

Write bash scripts to automate some of your commonly used tasks. Comment them. Imagine someone else is going to have to use them, even if you’re the only one who’s ever going to look at them. Not only will this help you learn lots of commands and force you to describe what they do (which will help you retain the information), it will be there as a record of how it works that you can go back and look at months or years later, to remind yourself how to do something.

tldr.sh

repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…lol

I currently use Bytestash. Used to use Obsidian, but the fact that all I have to do is pull up a webpage to copy and paste a command I need made ByteStash a better fit for me.

Fish

Install Thefuck to help when you screw up commands.

tealdeer and writing them down in a document

There’s nothing wrong with notes. I keep a text file open permanently at work and home with all my notes in it. I have a bunch of commands in it to copy-paste. Or Ctrl+r and type to search the history.

But if you want to memorize, I usually use flash cards.

Just create aliases with words you’ll remember. Fart, Fart2, ect.

Around 2012-2014 it was common to have Conky print things like system information or keyboard shortcuts in the desktop.

I think Conky is still around although less popular now. You could look into that though.

This is just an example from an image search for Conky desktop, but it gives you an idea how information can be displayed live.staticflickr.com/…/4543953032_e6d7473206.jpg

If it’s basic commands, there’s games like Terminal Quest that can help gamify your learning. Helped me.

I keep bash scripts on my desktop to do common things

Up arrow

or

“history” if you’re a psychopath

Hi,

I’m a Windows user of all life

I was a Mac user for 35+ years (still am, partly). It took me a little while to get used to new names/commands in Linux but that’s to be expected. And it is not much issue anymore ;)

I am those persons that has bad times remembering names, words… imagine commands… Even after using it so much I remember some basics but I’m struggling a lot and I have to go back to notes constantly to do some basic operations. Even worst after trying multiple distro from from different upstreams that commands are … Different

What kind of commands exactly? I mean, I don’t know that ‘commands’ are different from one distro to the other’ as they all use the same apps. So, beside the name of a few specific ones (like, maybe the app installer).

What would be your recommendations to help me. Are there tools to help this issue ?

My two sole advice:

• don’t try to remember too many commands. Instead, focus on the ones you use daily or very often. After you get those memorized you can always decide to memorize more… or not memorize them at all. I don’t bother remembering them, why would I when I can easily use Ctrl+F and instantly find them the moment I need them?

How do I do? I keep a text files in which I store all the stuff I seldom use but still want to be able to find in case I need it someday. To make finding them easier, I put descriptive titles and comments with each command. And that’s what I’m searching for, not the command name ;)

• If you’re talking about Terminal commands, learn to create your own aliases they will let you remember a short name instead of full commands. I have a few lengthy commands and some scripts (for example, to compress images) that I I regularly use. I don’t remember them. I’ve saved them in a .sh file that I can either call through a Terminal or simply by a right-click in my file Explorer (it’s Nemo and they’re called ‘Actions’, on Linux Mint)

Anything you have trouble remembering, or just find yourself doing often, create an alias (or bash script if it constitutes a multi line command). Name the alias something you can easily remember that also lets you know what that command does.

Then, and here’s he trick, don’t rely on the alias. Use it when you can’t remember, say “aww, damn it I had to use the alias again”, and then use which followed by the alias name to see what the command was again. Do this over and over and eventually some commands will stick.

Ones that you don’t care about or are just super long, just keep using the alias and don’t worry about remembering them. Use aliases as both commands and notes.

My solutions are:

• Just arrow up until you find the command from last.
• Learn to use CTRL-r and search for old commands.
• Bash completion helps with arguments
• Save stuff in shell scripts

history | grep command you’re searching for

That will return all commands you’ve typed that contain that keyword. Helps if you remember part of a command, but can’t remember the specific flags or the proper format.

If there are common commands that you use over and over, turn them into a Bash script and name the script something descriptive.

I do that for long commands that I don’t want to type out, like my whole system update workflow: sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

I saved that as a Bash script and called it “update.sh” then I saved it in my home directory. Now whenever I want to do a full system update, I just type ./update.sh and it asks me for my password, then updates my whole system without me having to do anything else. I do this with several different tasks like my remote Ansible server updates.

Other than that, you can buy/make a linux command cheat sheet with the most common commands. Keep it with you or next to your computer. Look at it whenever you need a refresh.

Keep a “cheat sheet” of common commands printed out nearby-- either something from the internet and/or a custom one for your own commands.

Also, nobody can remember all the commands. We mostly just remember the ones we use most often. Otherwise, we have to look things up! It’s not to bad since you know that the command exists and you just need to know the exact way to type it.

Find mnemonics to help remember certain things. For example if you want to decompress a .tar file, you remember “xtract zee file” or: tar -xzf

Probably not very helpful in this case but a very nice resource for learning cli is:

explainshell.com

Apart from fzf that helps me find recently used commands and also files and directories easily, I also use tldr that gives you a simple cheat sheet for every command and very often saves you trawling through endless man pages.

I recommend to installed starship, fish and ZSH. I just tried them recently with config files from a friend and am pleasantly surprised:

github.com/A5t4t1ne/arch_config/tree/main

I’m also not a text first person. There are a lot of us about. I have found GUI applications to do most commands I need. Most IT users don’t know them, as they’ve never searched for them. I pin the apps as Favourites in the launcher, to help remember my processes. The apps typically keep the last used values, making them quite productive.

you don’t need to remember anything, except commands you use the most often but even then it becomes muscle memory after a while. If you ever need some specific command to use, just look it up online.

Do you struggle to remember the names of commands or how to use them or how you have used them in the past?

Use GUIs for all the things.

Linux users are obsessed with the command line because it’s faster if you can remember everything. If you can’t, GUIs are actually much much faster because you are visually guided towards what you’re looking for.

I made a text file using vim that contains all of the commands I use. I open it in a terminal window when I need a reference.

You can make a cheatsheet and keep it on your desk

I just use guis

You could make aliases that are easier to remember for you.

If you e.g. had trouble remembering that mv does a rename, you could alias rename=mv. Ideally just put whatever you would have googled in “linux command to x” as the alias.

That’s the power of Linux; you can tweak everything to your preferences and needs.

Repetition is key. If you do it enough you’ll remember it.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/863150/pcie-bus-error-severity-corrected-type-physical-layer-id-00e5receiver-id

Not sure if you saw this Stack Overflow post yet.

@_elena

Bandwidth is the killer.

I would like #peertube to succeed...
But I don't know how that is possible.

My community TV station (c44.com.au) run a "streaming" service for a few years, and we have tried a few hosting sites..

...every time what killed us was bandwidth costs. Any remotely successful programs blew the cap for the month.

I don't see how you can avoid that.

@_elena

sry, don't take it personally but APP is an aplication in a cellphone.

If Yunohost offers the service of hosting Peertube instances it offers a platform (or something like that).
:)

@_elena How long have you been using #YunoHost ?

@_elena oh nice!

@_elena that's really pretty cool - I wasn't aware of YunoHost. Looks likes a thing that makes the start ways easier

@_elena nice! I do the same. It takes up much less bandwidth and resources than say Lemmy. But I have it running on very minimal software and no issues yet.

I have never heard of terminator.

I must be older and even more out of touch than you are, as I only use the default Terminal that came with my distro and I had to do a search to check what were Ghostty and Terminator (I know about the movie, obviously, but I’m also old enough to have been watching it in theatre the year it was first released ;)

I used terminator until a couple of weeks ago when I moved from i3 to hyprland. Now I use kitty 🤷🏼‍♂️

I have switched from XTerm to Konsole only a year ago.

I’m an old man. I don’t get the appeal of a terminal with hardware acceleration and all that fancy stuff. I use what the distro/DE came with.

I’ve used GNOME Terminal since 2005.

From a look at the documentation it’s just a fancy terminal. If you don’t really care about theming or image rendering then it’s not something you need. If you’re trying to rice a UI like hyprland then it looks like a good option.

Personally, I don’t see much added value over whatever the default terminal is but I’ve never been one to mess with things that do what they are supposed to.

A terminal is a terminal. If there is a feature you don’t know you need then you don’t need it. Run with whatever you have

I use foot which is Wayland aware and renders Unicode fonts. Honestly I don’t need much from the terminal itself as I’m usually in tmux to deal with all the “tabs” and scrollback.

I’d like to think there’s a difference between “keeping up with the times” and chasing whatever new thing gets advertised.

Unless you’re really into number chasing with benchmarks then just keep using whatever you like until something YOU find better comes along.

Also I’m GenZ and just use whatever comes with the DE, it’s not an old person thing shakes fist.

I just use konsole. It comes with plasma and is more than good enough for me.

The main advantages I have felt with fancy terminals are

• GPU accelerated means scrolling feels smoother
• Nice single configuration file for the terminal which I can easily move around
• Launches slightly faster. Only noticeable when you are launching multiple terminals

Terminator isn’t supported anymore as far as I remember. A good substitution for it is Tilix. I’d been using the latter for a while but recently I switched to the new default terminal in Fedora (it had weird name that I unable to remember) and Tilling Shell extension for Gnome.

Terminal emulators are pretty niche. I also tend to stick with what’s included with the DE. I’ve only used a third party terminal when I used gnome. Blackbox, as the one included in gnome at the time was still using gtk3.

On my Mac, I use Retroterm because emulates Old CRT screens - with scan lines and ghosting and stuff .

Does nothing , crashes sometimes, but is Lots of fun if you’re the guy that remembers floppies.

Afaik terminator is unmaintained but some people still use it. I’ve heard of Tilix as a good alternative but can’t tell you if that’s the case as I haven’t used either. I change terminals only if there’s a feature my current one doesn’t have.

I used alacritty (because that’s what came with the distro I used, ArcoLinux) until I switched to Wayland where alacritty font scaling was inconsistent across Xorg and Wayland sessions (and I was still switching between the two). So I went to kitty, until I was convinced to switch to foot because it seemed to open faster so I went to it. Then I switched to COSMIC which doesn’t let me remove window decorations server-side and neither kitty nor foot supported their removal client side, so I switched to alacritty which did.

I will switch to COSMIC terminal for convenience (as I use COSMIC) when they fix their font rendering (it’s like old Alacritty, only that modern Alacritty has fixed it but cosmic-term still hasn’t).

Eh, why would you? They’re fancy looking but if what you use works for you that’s about it.

I use yakuake (or guake if I still used gnome), I love having a consitent terminal slide down the screen every time I press a shortcut, especially if it’s supplememtary to what I’m doing in the graphical shell.

I loved terminator but after learning tmux I just don’t really see much point in the main feature. I use xfce4-terminal on i3 these days.

Is there a reason to change? I use foot terminal, have also used Alacritty and Kitty previously.

I switched from terminator to alacritty a while back. Moved to kitty a few months until a bug was fixed. I do try out new terminals occasionally, but nothing feels as nice as alacritty to me so i stay.

Prefer baratty

Multiple GNOME terminals in one window!

Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.

What’s its advantages over Terminator? Does it have any?

I chose Kitty cause of the name and I have never looked at anything else.

@amoroso Amazing; I would not have guessed even one of these.

@amoroso huh! That's fascinating. I think I need to think more about using sqlite.

SQLite is so fast, they compete with fopen. For some use cases, you can use SQLite instead of a filesystem, that can be 35% faster.

@amoroso That’s really interesting. I knew almost none of that.

@amoroso

> They don’t allow outside contributions.

What…

@amoroso I will remark that not *all* of SQLite's tests are proprietary.

And even without their proprietary tests SQLite's one of the best-tested libraries I've seen!

your digital abyss is filled with topics i just want someone to keep talking about.

this little poem is inspired by my thoughts on wikis being a better medium for personal websites than blogs, and should be the default choice.

blogs _seem_ obvious, but they're actually unintuitive and very disruptive to the creative process.

blogs demand that you edit, perfect, trim, idealize anything you're about to publish. the barrier-to-entry _feels_ high.

wikis are forgiving - they don't care if you have a page called "fjlorb" that you jot random interesting words down in. wikis are life companions - they contain lists, images, projects, dreams.

blogs contain a list of posts.

all snail the personal wiki movement.

Just install Arch, when You follow wiki it’s not that hard. if You will make mistakes during the process, You will gain better understanding of how things works while fixing errors.

I have sort of had enough of copy and pasting commands I find on the internet without having a good understanding of how they actually work.

One thing you could do is start trying to understand those commands.

Read the man pages or the documentation to figure out what the commands are actually doing. Once you have the “what” , you can dig deeper to get to the “why” if it isn’t obvious by that point.

After enough of that, you’ll go to copy/paste and already understand what it’s doing without needing to look it up again.

Then from there, it’s a matter of building the instinct to be able to say “I need to do X, so I’ll use commands Y and Z.”

1. You can always use man command and just read through it. If you want less text, use curl cheat.sh/command (learn how to use aliases) or the tools tldr and cheat
2. Install the fish shell, it makes using the terminal waaay easier, out of the box.
3. Install Alpaca flatpak, and use tinyllama or bigger LLM models. Tinyllama is already very sufficient at explaining linux commands and more, and runs fine on my reasonably powerful and modern laptop. Other models may be slow as fuck.
4. Use the terminal only. Log out, Ctrl+Alt+F2 and login, then use some tools.

$pwd
cd
echo
cat
nano
less
more
chmod
chown
#your package manager
lsblk
dd #be careful!
udisksctl
lsusb
lspci
...

1. There is this online terminal game/quiz but I cant find its name.

See if your library has "How Linux Works" - https://www.amazon.com.au/How-Linux-Works-Brian-Ward/dp/1718500408

For one, stop copying and pasting commands and start learning about the basics of the shell.

Things you’ll want to focus on:

1. Delimiters
2. Syntax (Bash by default, but the syntax for whatever your chosen shell is)
3. Switches
4. Path (absolute and relative)
5. Operators (Pipe will become one of your most heavily used)

Then once you learn to do some basics, I would hammer repetition. Just force yourself to do things you would usually do via GUI by command line. I started with the basics of updating my system way back in the day with sudo apt-get update && upgrade

Just don’t copy paste the commands. Really! Just take the time to understand what the command does, read the manual, and rewrite it yourself instead of pasting it. That alone will help a fair bit and can start guessing what it should be.

After a while of doing that it stops being a “paste this command to make the service run” and becomes “ask systemd to enable and start the service”. You start associating editing files in /etc with “will probably need to slap a sudo in front of that one”, you start mentally replacing nano/vi/vim/emacs/nvim/sed with your preferred way of editing the file, because you absorb the concept of “this command edits a text file”.

It sounds a bit nerdy, but dedicate some time just to learning a specific command once in a while. Start with something straightforward like ls. Read through the man pages and try out all the different options for it. After a while, you’ll master quite a few commands and will be able to string them together to perform more complex tasks. It’s definitely easier learning the system piece by piece like this. I used to learn by just jumping right in to a complex task, but I ended up with just a superficial understanding most of the time. Now days I try to be more deliberate about reading all the documentation and actually learning the tool/command/etc.

Also, Arch has the archinstall script that greatly simplifies the install process if you need it. You’ll definitely learn more doing it manually though. I’ve been using Arch as my daily driver for a year now and I love it.

Command line cheat sheet (with bonus vim controls):

Install TLDR pages from your package manager to get easy access to the most useful information

tldr.sh

If you’re not already, use it as your main system. Don’t dual boot. Stop using windows and mac. When you run into something you need to do, figure out how to do it on linux. It will be slow going at first, but after a few months you will pick up more productivity than you had before.

Another commenter recommended the fish shell, but I disagree because fish is not posix compliant. Almost all of the shell script examples that you will find assume posix compatibility and will usually have to be modified to run with fish. Once you get comfortable with a posix-compliant shell, then maybe consider fish or another “modern” shell.

On the topic of shells, read the bash manual. It’s long and informative. You don’t have to memorize it, but be aware of the different concepts there, and refer to it when you need to. It’s pretty horrible as a programming language, but it’s what glues most of Linux together.

I learned a lot by using a less common distro (solus). When I would have a problem, the solutions I could find on forums or arch wiki wouldn’t apply to my distro directly, and I would have to look into the solution for long enough to understand what needed to change in order for the solution to work.

You can probably do this on any distro, just by not using commands you find online until you understand what they’re doing and why that might fix your problem. Arch wiki is a great resource for any distro, even though it won’t always be accurate for the distro you’re on.

I have been using Linux since the early 90s. I don’t know it all. I read man pages. I use -h or --help. I read the arch wiki. I read docs. I read source files and examples. You will never know it all. There is too much information.

You need to know how to find information. It can be tricky. Knowing how to ask the right questions often requires you to know a bit of the answer.

Stumbling about trying to find answers is training the skills you need.

I think it helps if you have a programming background and IT support experience. Not just because you will understand more concepts and terms but because you have already developed some of those skills but some people come from other backgrounds and pick things up really quickly.

Explainshell.com is pretty useful for understanding shell commands you might find on forums.

And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Incrementally over time by reading the documentation and/or manuals of the commands I need to run and looking up how others solve the problems that I need to get other ideas about things (even, periodically, for things that I already know how to do to see if anyone has found a better way to do it or if a new tool has come out that helps). And trying things out/experimenting with different ways of doing things to find out what works well or not.

To be honest I’ve been using Linux for years and I still paste commands all the time. The only difference is that now when I am trouble shooting I know what command I need just not the options and how to use it

Another book rec: pragprog.com/…/small-sharp-software-tools/

Attempt an Arch install entirely from memory. You might want to try this in a VM, in case something goes wrong, but just do it. If you can’t quite remember what to do, man and ls /bin are your friends.

Arch Linux Handbook on internet Archive

More than anything, what leveled up my Linux knowledge was switching to Gentoo back while I was in college.

Before that, I used SuSE, and I switched specifically because I felt like I wasn’t learning anything really about Linux just by using point-and-click tools like YAST.

I’ve used Arch for the last… 7-ish years? (Though now I’m basically in the process of switching back to Gentoo. In terms of learning Linux, Arch is… close to as good as Gentoo for that purpose. Not quite as good, but pretty close.)

As for the best approach for learning, though, you know how they say the best way to learn a language is “immersion”? As in, to move to where they speak the language. In the same way, if what you’re going for is to learn, just take a dive. Install Arch over top of your current OS and don’t look back. Just commit to it.

Also, use the most minimal stuff you can. Skip KDE and use dwm. Skip the login manager and start your GUI from the command line. Don’t install a file manager and instead use Bash directly. (It’s more than capable.) Don’t install anything you can do instead with a Bash one-liner or a small Bash script. If after you’ve gotten pretty used to minimal stuff you still want something that the heavier alternatives offer, you can of course switch, but if your aim is to learn, avoid using the kind of stuff that tries to be “user friendly” by hiding all the internal implementation details from you. (Instead use the stuff that is user friendly by virtue of having so few moving parts that understanding how it works under-the-hood is trivial.)

And, don’t settle for “it’s fucked beyond repair.” If it’s fucked, google your ass off. If that doesn’t work, ask on the official Arch forums or here or wherever. (Don’t worry, they don’t bite.)

When you are doing stuff in the terminal write it down somewhere else also, on a piece of real life paper or in a simple text document or whatever works for you.

In general I found taking notes while trying to do things in the terminal helped me learn.

I will be using your example of Arch as a great stepping off point, because honestly imo the best way to learn is by having a project to work on

1. RTFM - Read The Fucking Manual. Read the docs, read the code comments if need be. In the case of installing an OS, use the installation guide as a starting point; Arch’s is on their wiki, and links to several other sections that go more in-depth about what each step does and why it does it.

2. DuckDuck it - if you don’t understand what something is or why you’re doing it, search it. If you understand it completely, search it anyway and check the docs because no you don’t, you just don’t know how little you know. If you know why we do something and what function it fulfills, but not how… Then you’re a power user.

Using your example of commands from the internet, break the command down into as many parts as you can, and figure out what each part does. If there’s punctuation marks, don’t assume you know what those are doing. man [command’s name] is your friend.

1. Do all of the above as often as possible, no matter how slow it makes progress feel. Learning these things the proper way now will save you from days, weeks and months of troubleshooting in the future. I mean it, literally at every step of the process.

2. secondary sources are invaluable, but for this it might help to get into the best way to self-educate. The only gospel are the docs and/or manual that were written by the code/OS maintainers - primary sources - everything else is opinion.

Here’s a source i agree with on the best way to self-educate, but keep in mind even Artem is still just a secondary source.

That being said, here’s a few secondary sources that helped me understand how OSes work and why:

nand2tetris: build an operating system starting with logic gates and working your way up from there. It has a offshoot site that’s slowly being rolled out, that implements it all in a gamified interface: nandgame

os-tutorial: build an OS from scratch

Linux From Scratch: Learn everything about Linux by building your own distro from the kernel up.

Unfortunately everything that taught about the behind-the-scenes aspects of OSes in general—and Linux in specific—were either projects like the above, or just seeing what came up in a DuckDuckGo, Youtube, forum, or wiki etc. search. Below are just resources that teach you about the “power user” level of knowledge, not “super user” but not your average user either.

Fireships’ 100+ Linux Things you Need to Know: it’s not particularly good on its own, but it does introduce a lot of concepts and vocab for you to then look up elsewhere

freeCodeCamp.org offers a lot of courses that will go over using Linux. None go too in-depth on the fundamentals of Operating Systems, but they will still introduce most of what you need to know for day-to-day use. I don’t want to link them all, but just search for linux freecodecamp on youtube and find one that piques your interest. The longer, the more in-depth—you don’t have to watch it all in one sitting.

1. And of course, when all else fails: just ask. Participate in the community, don’t be afraid of looking stupid. The only people that get no respect are the ones who refuse to accept others’ help because they know better than those they’re asking to help them. (ignore the gatekeepers who want to project their own need for an identity onto you)

Using tldr to learn commands. It gives you the information you are probably looking for in the man page but it’s not buried among lines and lines and lines of arcane stuff and it’s formatted in a readable way with helpful examples. Saved my sanity more than once.

I’m not saying “don’t read the man pages”, they are great way to get a deeper understanding of commands. But when you are just wondering what a command does and how it’s commonly used, then a two lines summary + example is much more helpful than an essay going in minute details over everything.

Since it takes a lot less time than hunting the same info in the man page, you can run it before every command you are not familiar with, without too much hassle. Then if you want more info you can check the man page.

Work at the tip of your “paygrade” and try to make immersion as fun as possible. Maybe consider using a different disk for Linux, since mistakes are the best way to learn. (Don’t reinstall just because something broke).

Here are some fantastic ways to make mistakes:

1. Install a more involved, but typical, CLI-centric, DIY-friendly distro – from today’s order of difficulty, that’s EndeavourOS, (install is easy, then you can learn one package at a time), Arch Linux (install is hard iff you have trouble with understanding wiki structure, and you’ll want familiarity with what packages you need), and Gentoo (the installation guide is incredible).
2. Try out new CLI software. The terminal is your friend! Are you gonna back up videos with yt-dlp? Perhaps make a shell script for something? Maybe search the AUR for something cool to try out (underrated function of the AUR: test-driving!). With a terminal, who needs file explorer?
3. Play a game. Linux games exist… they’re called CTFs ;). Bandit is pretty fun for beginners (try to keep notes! Maybe use Git?): overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/
4. Make unnecessary customizations (“rices”). Your shell can be made sexy. Your lockscreen can be made sexy. Your windows can be made sexy. (And if you break something, don’t reinstall :3). Remember: if you build something pretty and see it every day… absolute sex.
5. And of course, flex your hands, get your apron on, have fun popping the engine and fixing! How does one ask questions, put in due diligence, Google, read logs (like journalctl or dmesg or –verbose or whatever)? This is a skill you don’t lose – and we’ll be happy to answer a good question.

Of course all of this depends on where you are (the tip of your paygrade). For pasting commands specifically, as you said… do 'em one at a time – and understand each one.
Like, what is piping |? Why is xargs after it? Why can one stop ping with CTRL+C? What does man curl say about this weird curl command? How does one even read a manpage well, anyway? Why is there so much gpg?

And at the end of the day… remember how fun this shit is. The engine is open; we’re allowed to look inside. Woohoo!

My advice would be look up The Missing Semester it’s a free online MIT course on how to use the terminal and it will govern you a better understanding of how to use it and Linux more generally. Really helpful to find your way around and give you an intuitive sense of what you’re trying to achieve.

Then beyond that installing arch is easy with archinstall but it’s probably more helpful to learn about the components of desktop Linux and what they do so that you actually know what you’re doing.

on the tailend of a convo in in a discord recently I added a command to the “customize chatgpt” section to allow chatgpt to have a custom “man” like command similar to linux, but that works for all code or commands.

when a prompt is givin beginning with the word man followed by code or commands please respond with a table following these rules and nothing else: skip title row, No backticks around command components, No unnecessary rows, column 1 should contain the command component, column 2 should contain a brief command description

What tips/ideas do you have for getting better at navigating the terminal, and getting a better understanding of how the os works. What is a good roadmap to follow? And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Time, I’ve been using linux since the 90’s and I learn things I probably should have known before every day

Start running servers if you haven’t already. Use an old computer, or an SBC or VPS and setup some Linux servers. There’s lots of different ways to do it, so mess around and break shit over and over. You can’t help but learn that way, though I would highly suggest you take notes/documentation. This is a habit I’m trying to develop after too long :)

I guess my end goal is to be able to comfortably install and use arch Linux with my own customization’s and be able to fix it when things go wrong.

Why? I have been using Linux for nearly two decades and I am perfectly content with a low-config distro and desktop environment. You don’t have to use Arch but if you insist get a Steam Deck.

Here is a bunch of random tips to become more comfortable with the terminal.

Do absolutely everything that you can on the terminal.

When you install something, enable the verbose if possible and snoop around the logs to see what is happening.

If an app or an install fails, look at the logs to see what is the issue, and try to fix it by actually resolving the error itself first instead of finding the commands on the internet to fix your issue.

Instead of googling for your command options, use the help menu from the application and try to figure out how to use the command from there.

Just use it and fix things when they break. There’s no magic bullet - just experience.

I guess my end goal is to be able to comfortably install and use arch Linux with my own customization’s and be able to fix it when things go wrong.

What tips/ideas do you have for getting better at navigating the terminal, and getting a better understanding of how the os works. What is a good roadmap to follow? And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

You learn by doing and by failing. Like we learned to walk, to write, to drive, to kiss, to speak a foreign language, or even to lace our shoes (and, yep, even that was a heavy trial and error process for toddler-us back then).

• Install Arch (in a VM, maybe) and while doing so read the Arch Wiki to understand each step, each action and the role of each app you’re asked to install. The Arch Wiki is an impressively well done documentation.
• Be fine knowing that it will take time to learn anything new (not just Arch, anything), you won’t get good at it the first time. Don’t rush it, take your time.
• Be fine knowing that you will face issues and will most likely fail at some point, be it to instal Arch or in doing whatever new. There is no other way to learn, for all of us, than by failing and then trying again, over and over. Once again like we learned to walk (by falling on our butt), to lace our shoes (by making a mess) or to kiss (by not doing it great at first).

Learning takes time and efforts. Perseverance, and humility. There is no shortcut to learning anything that is worth learning, not just Arch. But the reward is also so much worth it. Einstein had to learn calculus, Da Vinci had to learn how to hold a paint brush, and Tolstoy like Flaubert had to learn to write and I’m willing to bet they all made mistakes while they were learning their respective craft.

Even without referring to geniuses: the first time I tried to install Arch I ran away screaming and swearing I would never touch that thing again. The second time, I had already managed to read a good chunk of the relevant part of the wiki and used it constantly at each step of the process. I still failed at it but at least I understood why I failed and I felt incredibly more… in charge, despite me failing. The third time, I managed to have it running, and to install most the packages I wanted. That was great. There was no fourth time as, as much as I love Arch (which is a lot), I quickly realized using it that constant updates were not what I wanted from my OS and apps (I’m an old-ish user with very basic needs, I’m not even that much of a geek to be honest). So, I switched to the complete opposite of Arch (Debian, another great love of mine I must say). Still, learning and using Arch taught me a lot about Linux in general and about… myself.

Linux is like kung-fu, mastery comes through practice
Learn the ways of Linux-fu

I’m going to go against the grain a bit and suggest studying for a certificate. Find one that looks interesting, and just prepare for it. You don’t necessarily have to get the certificate, but training for it will give you a good foundation for running your systems.

hackr.io/blog/best-linux-certifications

Haven’t seen anyone mention overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ yet. It’s a Linux shell game where you need to solve problems using shell commands that only requires an ssh client on your machine: you ssh into the first server, solve a problem, and the solution points you to the next server. It starts easy (e.g. read out this file using cat) but gets hard quickly. But you can always look up solutions when you’re stuck. It gives a good idea what certain commands are used for and how they can be combined in powerful ways.

I can tell you how I learned linux. be prepared to cringe.

1. I installed Linux before going to school, I figured that if I used Linux as my main OS I would be less tempted to dick around and play games

2. I eventually found a coop part time job as a dev. I used my own Linux machine, and being the star eyed young person I was I used arch.

this is the cringe part:

1. I did dev work on arch Linux without fully understanding how it works and ran into multiple issues (none of which was because of arch). for instance my USB wifi driver was the dogshit broadcom ones so the “drivers” for it were kind of messed and I had to hack several things into get it to work.

I leraned systemd, Linux kernel modules, dkpg, obviously more familiarity with bash and shell stuff

1. I ran into issues with grub because FUCK grub. so I had to learn about boot loaders, fixing your install with chroot on a live usb, I also wrote step by step guides to untuck my particular problem just in case I run into it again

so morlw of the story is… dive in?

“I take full responsibility for my Arch system.”

For getting better at terminal I would suggest looking into alternative shells. Bash is fine, but it’s not exactly user friendly by default. Something with more robust auto completion like zsh or saner defaults like fish could make the learning experience easier. You can always come back to bash later.

For understanding how the OS works I would start by reading about the file system layout, then look into the init process.

I got to the point I am at through a series of projects of increasing complexity. First I ran a web server on my machine to copy files over the network. Then I used a spare PC to make a simple SMB server. Later I made it into a HTPC pirate box, for streaming stuff downloaded off Usenet to my Xbox. At some point I ran a minecraft server (before docker came along and trivialized this), and got into a bunch of sysadmin and programming stuff and that’s pretty much it.

programming.dev/c/linuxupskillchallenge

• To learn Arch, install it from scratch (without archinstall), it’ll force you to read the Wiki and learn a lot of necessary commands in the process. After the installation, just keep using it. Using a Linux distro full-time as the only installed OS is the best way to keep at it and truly learn it over time. There’s no magic bullet here. Just keep using it and solving problems or issues as you go, learning more and more stuff as you go. If you need other OSses as well, run those in a VM.

• Don’t blindly copy/paste commands you don’t understand. Always try to understand them first. Some commands can be very disruptive or even destroy your configuration. If you don’t understand it or are able to adapt it so that it fits to your particular configuration or system, you can EASILY damage a configuration, or even make your system unusable. Also, some people like trolling other people and deliberately share harmful commands. Generally, test potentially destructive commands or complex commandlines before actually running them.

• Document major config changes that you do. This is useful because you’ll be able to undo certain changes or even replicate your current system configuration fast when you change distros or have to reinstall in the future. For example my current Arch-based setup is fully documented in form of an almost-directly executable shell script. It does require some interactions but very little. If I ever have to reinstall this system, or upgrade my hardware, it can be done insanely fast and it’ll have the exact same configuration. This goes from basic partitioning and encryption all the way up to dotfiles and individual program configurations.

• Don’t feel the need to learn hard/advanced tools like Vim or Emacs unless you really think you’re getting an advantage from that and aren’t hesitant to put in the time and effort to learn them. Most people don’t need to use them. They’re amazing tools but you need to be prepared to lose quite a lot of time to learn them before you can become productive with them, and this might not be a tradeoff that’s useful for every single user. You can also get away with much simpler tools, like nano (as a console-based editor) or whatever programmer’s text editor you want.

• Similarly, whether a pure WM or compositor plus assorted tools compared to a full desktop environment is worth it for you or not, is up to you. There’s no wrong or right answer here. I’ve tried out pretty much everything and these days use KDE Plasma because I like the consistency and integrations and dislike having different, inconsistent stand-alone tools for panels, menus, notifications, wallpaper, file manager and so on. But again, there’s no wrong or right answer here. Just what makes more sense for you. It’s worth learning how to be able to configure and use a minimalistic setup, for sure. So trying it out doesn’t hurt and increases your knowledge overall. In general, in the Linux world it’s good to always know enough to not be screwed once some component suddenly doesn’t work anymore. For example, a competent Linux user should be able to deal with (temporarily) not having a GUI and fixing his system via commandline.

• A minimalistic, DIY distro like Arch can be amazing to learn everything, if you want to do that at least. If you just want a working desktop system with as little effort as possible, then don’t do that. But if you intend to learn every detail, then a distro like Arch is better suited for that goal than a “bloated”, fully pre-configured distro like Mint or Ubuntu is. Because Arch is much simpler on a technical level than those are. It’s much easier to understand e.g. the relatively simple package building process on Arch than it is on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. But this “simple” explicitly refers to technical simplicity or minimalism. Most users expect something else when they hear “something is simple”. Arch is not simple as in beginner-friendly, but it is simple in terms of technical complexity, which is why many advanced users and tinkerers like it because it doesn’t stand in their way. It also means though that you HAVE to learn many things, e.g. how to configure a firewall, because it doesn’t come with any preinstalled by default. With Arch, the admin is supposed to know about everything and configure every component himself, at least on a somewhat basic level.

• If you want to go to even more details, you could also try out a source-based distro like Gentoo or Crux, which can also be a great learning experience, but it’s even more details regarding compilations of each package, dependencies, compile-time options, etc. you have to deal with than with a minimalistic binary-package-based distro like Arch, so whether that’s useful for you or not is up to you of course.

• While we’re at it: LFS (Linux from Scratch) is not a distro per se, it’s a guide on how to build your own distribution from scratch. It’s VERY time intensive and not recommended unless you truly want to learn how to build a complete distribution from scratch, or maybe start your own distro some day which isn’t based on another existing distro.

If you are beginner in Linux, try beginner-friendly Arch-based distro: EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro

You can learn Arch without too much hassle while using one of them

1. Learn FreeBSD.

2. Learn Linux.

/s

I’d recommend reading man pages. They’re a great way to understand the programs that are on your system. The Arch Wiki and the Gentoo Wiki both provide additional information that may be of use to you.

What tips/ideas do you have for getting better at navigating the terminal, and getting a better understanding of how the os works

Running an OS as a virtual is liberating. Dive in, make mistakes, fix them (or not and have to reinstall or redo from the last save). No real consequences for exploring.

This course by the Linux Foundation goes over the basics and I thought it was pretty good. I was a long time user of Linux when I came across this and wanted to see how much I really knew. It’s very easy to follow and well structured

…linuxfoundation.org/…/introduction-to-linux/

If you’re in the position to take certificates then that’s a another way of learning a lot. At least it has worked for me. I’ve over the last half year taken RHCSA and RHCE from RedHat - though paid by work. Theses in specific are expensive, but I’m sure there are other ones that are cheaper. This would also allow you to ‘show off’ your skills in an official way should you need to, for applying for certain jobs etc…

I at least find this way to be helpful as you have to motivate yourself to learn and pass an exam to get the certificate. It might not be for everyone though.

If you want to get better at Linux terminal and standard unix commands I would try overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

It’s an interactive tutorial which will help build basic skills. There are a million guides and walkthroughs for this, but I would try each level on your own first before you look at a guide.

Switch to rolling distro, it will break so many things with each update you’ll learn stuff by fixing it. Also you can check overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

I’m late to the party but have you seen Linux Journey? linuxjourney.com

The tldr cli (tldr.sh) is a great way to get familiar with options of differ programs.

Install harder distros (preferably on bare metal) and use them. If you need to fix something, google it. This helped me a lot.

I still find Tealdeer useful even now, it helps me get working with commands I know little about, more so than a manpage

Read and do! If it’s just a toy you play with sometimes, you might find learning harder. I find that making it your daily driver will motivate you to improve and fix things and in doing that you’ll learn.

Are you using fractional scaling?

use case of looking sharp?

Gnome is just as beautiful as MacOS. The only difference is that MacOS is colorful, while Gnome is more b&w in its design. In fact, I’d say that gnome is more modern than macOS in its overall design philosophy. So modern, that some people hate it, lol. But modern nonetheless.

You won’t get the same united look in Gnome as in mac OS. Applications will look a bit different and not exactly the same.

I think you get used to it though. I don’t think about it at all anymore.

Consider adding the Dash To Panel extension. It was the polish Gnome was missing for me: extensions.gnome.org/extension/…/dash-to-panel/

I’d also be a bit remiss if I didn’t recommended WinTile, too: …gnome.org/…/wintile-windows-10-window-tiling-for…

I find Gnome smoother than macOS.

This wasn’t the case many years ago, but now I find Gnome pretty good, the amount of bugs are surprisingly low.

On the other hand, I experience glitches on macOS regularly on the UI, especially on a multi-monitor setup (I use both Gnome and macOS with multiple monitors).

And generally feature-wise I find Gnome a lot more convenient to use in terms of window or workspace management.

As others have said, it is not entirely clear what you mean by sharp. Based on the rounded corner and button example you gave previously, I think it might just be the graphic design. MacOS has had a lot of time invested into its design language including subtle things like a thin, almost glass-like specular border around windows and then a drop shadow. This very much becomes a matter of taste in many cases, but for some it helps identify boundaries more precisely. Perhaps have a look at github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme, which replicates MacOS as closely as possible. You may be able to experiment with it side by side and see if you can figure out exactly what design element it is that you are looking for.