Linux Mindset

Hello there! Today I would like to talk a bit about Linux.

Many years ago, when I was in middle school, during a computer class, I found a very interesting thing on the internet, it was called Ubuntu, now Ubuntu had existed long before I discovered it, and even before Ubuntu, there was a distribution called Debian and being a curious soul I went and tried to install this wonderful little distribution, but to my dismay it failed pretty much instantly.

It took me a few tries to get it to work, but once I had gotten it to work on my machine, it was beautiful, there was Gnome 2, a powerful terminal which would listen to my command, and perform it once I had clicked enter on my keyboard, it was a very joyous moment for this little nerd and that was when it all started.

A few weeks later and I was finally being able to wield the great powers which the terminal had bestowed upon me, I took it all and continued on my quest, as this was merely a little taste of what this world could give me.

That's a small story from when I discovered the wonderful thing called Linux and after having used almost every single distro since that humble beginning, failing and breaking the system in ways I never even could imagine possible. I wanted to extend an olive branch to the newly arrived people in the "Linux sphere" so let's start with that now.

Be Patient

First thing you will need to learn, and this is a hard one, but be patient. This should go without saying, but a common problem I see with people wanting to get into something new is that they most often just want everything to just work and not doing any kind of work.

While this is true for most cases, there might be a time when you get an error and what you need to do at such a time is to just take a deep breath and figure out what went wrong. It's essentially a make or break point for many people only because of the fact that they dont have the patience to continue and go back to their old ways of using a computer.

Don't be like that, be better.

Figure out what went wrong

There might come a time when an application wont start, and no error code is displayed as the result of not starting, dont fret, Dreameh is here for you.

If the application has a generic command to start via the terminal, try to type that command in, in order to see if you are able to generate the error code. If this doesn't work like with some application which doesn't simply start no matter how much you try to write their name, then what you should do is to locate the executable

which <application>

is generally how you would locate a executable and it would look something like this:

if this feels too complicated, then there's an alternative for you, and that alternative is to check the location of the executable from the application list, which might generally look like this:

if you cannot find the executable for your application through any of these means, then you should probably install the application, as it is not currently installed.

Learn to use google

One thing I learned early on, was that google is such an amazing tool for learning, but it seems like many seem to fail when it comes to how to google in order to get the right result. So let me teach you the basics in how to google correctly.

if you ever get an error, then you need to first see if there's an error code lurking.

If you find the error code, then you simply go to google and type following in:

<error-code> linux

or if it might be something specific for let's say Ubuntu, then following would be more appropriate:

<error-code> Ubuntu

if you know these two ways of searching, then life will be easy using linux, as no problem will ever be too big for you to solve, no package shall be in-accessable, nor shall any user group be unavailable for you.

Last thing

As you probably already know, the word Linux is used in the incorrect way all over the world only to create confusion as Linux is currently used as a word for the group of distributions that exist with the Linux Kernel, and while I would say that it might be correct to say "I use Linux", it makes little sense to the seasoned user, as they will most often ask you about the distribution and not about the kernel.

so remember:

Linux == Kernel

Ubuntu == Distribution