this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Linux
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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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In my experience, when Linux works, it’s beautiful (yay package managers). But once you have an issue or go off the beaten path, it can get complex and confusing very quickly. You’ll find a perfect fix… oh wait, that’s for Red Hat. This is Ubuntu and everything is different.
This man page is thirty pages long and has in depth descriptions of all fifty switches in alphabetical order, but all i want is an example on how to do a very simple, common thing with it. And of course, all commands have their own syntax (of course windows isn’t any better, outside of Powershell).
Don’t curl to bash, it’s dangerous. But heaven help the adventurer that tries to do the install manually. And building from the source? Hah!
The registry gets a ton of shit, and yes, it can be opaque and confusing, but hundreds of text files in hundreds of random directories (that might be a different place on a different distro), all with their own syntax, isn’t necessarily all that more intuitive.
You want this to work differently? Then code a fix yourself! What do you mean you’re not a programmer?
I had multiple Ubuntu installs stop updating because the installer by default made the /boot partition (IIRC) something like 100MB. Do a couple updates and that gets filled up with unused files, and then apt craps itself. And this wasn’t all too long ago - well after the point it was supposed to be the district for the everyman.
Like you, I want to like it more, but it’s never smooth sailing. Granted, a lot of that is familiarity with Windows (and believe me, many curses have been thrown MS’s way), but it always seems to turn into a struggle.
Not just "oh this is for redhat and I'm on Ubuntu" but what I run into all the time is that you find a perfect guide but it turns out to be for the wrong version of Ubuntu. So most of it works until you get half way through and you get an error because they've switched from initd to systemd or something. Then you are stuck, do you try to roll back what you've done so far? Try to adapt the instructions to the new system? Then you end up chasing your tail down rabbit holes of what is backwards compatible, what isn't, what can coexist and what can't, etc etc etc.
If you have been using a particular distro and are familiar with the subsystems then the new version comes out and you just have to learn about the few changes in the release but for someone new it adds a whole second layer of complexity to have to learn the whole new OS in addition to trying to blindly figure out how the old system worked, what's different in the new system and how you adapt instructions from the old one to the new one, or if you should just give up and try to find a different guide that will work.
Yes
manis intended to be a manual so it's understandably bad at being a cheatsheet. Check outtldrortealdeer. They are similar but I foundtealdeerto be much faster for me. Also try a shell with better completion than bash, likezshorfish. Having better completion will sometimes sidestep the need for a cheatsheet altogether.You can curl the file normally, inspect, and then run it with bash. All the safety issues of running stuff you found online still apply (is the source trusted?), but you don't get the issues that arise specifically from piping curl to bash. But most applications don't need you to
curl | bashin the first time because of package managers.