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Where to get tips and advice for someone new to linux (feddit.uk)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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I would class myself as reasonably computer literate but have always used windows (since win95 so that dates me). I'm looking to get used to Linux and have stuck mint onto an old notebook to get used to the system.

We've been up and running for a couple of months now and I've got the basics going but I'm starting to collect questions on how to do this, best ways to achieve that etc, in times past there would probably be a good forum community I could start posting on to learn but I don't know where to go these days.

Where do you take your open questions to, to learn and improve.

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[–] 22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It's honestly the same as with Windows - search engines and manuals.
When you get stuck explain what you want to do, what you've tried and what guides/manuals you've used and you'll get good responses from most of the linux communities.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I find people often rely too much on guides which just tell you the steps, and you never learn how it actually works. So I would emphasize the manual bit to understand what that thing the guide told you to do actually does.

    The other big hurdle is not being able to assess information for accuracy. If you have no prior knowledge, you have no clue whether that blog post with a guide you found is written by someone clueless or a genius. I've had that problem before on a topic I was unfamiliar with, and literally had to just ask an experienced person whether this looked okay or not. They were happy to correct all the misinformation I almost followed.

    On a related note, it's always easier to make people give corrections than tell you everything from scratch. Just human nature.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    The other big hurdle is not being able to assess information for accuracy. If you have no prior knowledge, you have no clue whether that blog post with a guide you found is written by someone clueless or a genius.

    That's definitely a thing in programming tutorials. When I'm unfamiliar with a library or something it's hard to tell if a tutorial is actually following best practices or if it's "tutorial code", distilled and technically working but missing edge cases or not scalable.

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