Linux

That after getting used to Linux I will hate to be forced to use less free operating systems.

How to quit vim.

I guess the main things would be:

• As a beginner, don't bother trying to dual boot -- If you still need a Windows box, get some cheap hardware to do your Linux work on. It's too easy to screw up both systems otherwise.
• Don't get too hung up on a specific distro, the better you are at dealing with different configurations, the better prepared you will be for whatever comes. Once you've gotten one set up, don't be afraid to just try a different one.

The 1:1 windows:Linux replacement is just a means to keep you on Windows. Once you learn Linux, you'll come to understand how much of a farce it is and how it's designed to keep you away

That I could put /home on a different drive
That I would never boot into Windows again so having partitions for it was a waste of time
That mounting drives with their uuid as the mount location is insane

I learned to never settle. If you don't like the default workflow of Gnome, try some extensions, or even a different DE. Same with Package Managers. If you don't like the syntax, make an alias. Don't just "deal with it". Windows has brainwashed people into thinking that there is only one way to do a thing.

Trying not to make it windows.

There's a lot of conveniences that Windows comes default with.

When I switched to Linux, my immediate goal was to find alternatives for EVERYTHING. That lead to being disappointed by a lot.

Understanding Linux and also recognizing there's a lot of shit I don't need (that windows was giving me for the sake of VALUE) was a game changer.

It was free, I could not afford a Sun workstation and Minix had problems, so when this Finnish guy wrote in Usenet that he was working on a free kernel/OS, it was cool!

Linux is pretty easy to use nowadays. The only thing I would check before switching is driver compatibility.

"20 years from now, people are still discussing moving to Linux!"

Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.

• tab completion in bash
• vim
• zfs
• git (though it didn't exist then)

Rasberry Pi or other NUC is a great way to begin.

To start sooner.

Unmounting removable drives after writing to then is crucially more important than on Windows

I wish I'd known how much of a pain in the ass having an NVIDIA card would be. I would have gotten a different computer.

Don't get an Nvidia gpu

It was ~20 years ago so my advice to myself then would be pretty irrelevant now. I messed up my laptop, and my advice then would have been don't start with a laptop (because laptop compatibility was lacking back then compared to desktop, different times).

That I shouldn't care as much about installed packages I no longer use. Sure, going through installed programs and cleaning up from time to time is ok, but no need to panic if something sticks around.

Especially when I installed something manually needing dependencies for programming, I tend to write down names of installed packages and then managing it manually, because I wasn't yet aware what their names mean. Now using same OS for over a year, heavly testing stuff, having multiple desktop enviroments and not cleaning it up my system partition is taking less than 30GB, compared to 1TB disk it's nothing.

When you're just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don't look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don't distro hop just to see what you're missing.

Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you're trying to get work done.

Always put your filesystems in an LVM volume (and in general, partition disks with LVM rather than partition tables)! You never know when you might need to combine multiple disks, make a snapshot, add redundancy, or transfer to another disk without unmounting. But it's very difficult to format a block device as LVM once you can't erase its contents.

Make your /boot partition at least 500MiB.

Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk. You never know when you might need to add EFI and boot partitions to that disk. And again, it's very difficult to do after the fact.

After switching to Linux I wish I knew how to report bugs. I'm a qa tester and I notice so many little things that can be replicated and fixing them would polish the user experience. But there are so many layers I don't know who to report the issue to. My first thought wasto report it to the distro forum and have the more technical people there take a look at the issue then escalate it to the distro maintainers or the actual software devs.

Another thing I wish I knew, was how to get my 2nd hdd to mount automatically. I fucked to my system 4 times(and recovered it) trying and then had to get my sys admin friend to do it for me.

TIL there's tab completion lol

That even though you are running an LTS version of Ubuntu (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04), some packages that have arrived over a year ago on e.g. 23.10 will never arrive on 22.04.

Example: i3-wm 4.22 or up (https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=i3&searchon=names&suite=jammy§ion=all).

That you can use any DE on any distro

Gnome is better on 1920 than in 1366. XFCE is better on 1366...

And Ubuntu sucks..