Hello Beautiful People, Nomadev is back with another blog in this new year. I hope the new year will make your life brighter, I have all the good wishes for you. Thanks for being such constant supporters.
Today we are going to see a bunch of mistakes that Linux beginner makes when they first move to Linux. So let's start with our topic
1. Thinking Linux is Windows/macOS
Linux can do almost all the things that a mac or windows system can do, that's absolutely correct but it does the stuff not in exact same way that you are habitual of doing, for example, drivers on Linux, there is virtually no driver installation apart from the proprietary NVIDIA drivers either your devices drivers are in the Linux kernel and it's supported out of the box or the drivers are not in there and chances are it won't get supported. You can compile some third-party drivers for a few very limited sets of peripherals but generally, your drivers are in the kernel you get newer drivers when you update the kernel and that's the file system will be different and the location of files will also, be different.
2. Getting Hung up on distributions
Distribution is basically just a way to package the Linux kernel to some system tools. A graphical desktop manages some drivers basically, a few packages and that's what users generally think when they see. A distro is a look that retains the look and feels of this distribution and what they really want is something that looks like that not specifically the distro itself.
Beginners will tend to install or gravitate towards a specific distribution because of the way it looks and feels. They tend to forget or not know that you can replicate the look and feel on virtually any other distribution Linux is customizable. You can grab the theme and the icons and do that exact look somewhere else what users should really
look for is desktop environments, not distributions when you're a beginner you need to look at a distro that you like you like the way it looks.
3. Getting stuck on the default
I often get messages on Twitter telling me oh I used to use this distro or I used to use this desktop but then I couldn't do this and so I moved to another distro entirely like seriously, I had users telling me that they moved distributions because the close button on the windows was on the left instead of on the right seriously LOL and that all comes from the fact that people are used to generally aren't very customizable out of the box you can tweak a few things in mac os or on windows but that's very very limited or you could use third party tools and break your system that's not the case on Linux here you can virtually tweak or change anything without even changing desktop environments.
You have extensions and gnome tweaks and you can really make this thing your own users coming from windows or mac os generally expect things to stay the way they are out of the box and so if something doesn't work for them they will just move house completely on Linux.
4. Expecting Previous software to work
The fourth mistake Linux beginners make is expecting all of their programs to just work on Linux. Linux doesn't run Windows programs or mac programs you wouldn't expect windows programs on a mac, you wouldn't expect mac programs on windows you can't expect windows or mac programs.
On Linux, some of them can work. if you're a professional and if most
if not all of your workflow depends on a specific application you need to look it up beforehand check if it runs on Linux and if it has the whole range of functionality that you would expect if you're an individual and you can learn new alternatives expect to waste some time.
5. Following CLI tutorials blindly
The fifth mistake Linux beginners make is generally following command line tutorials online completely blindly most tutorials for Linux are written using command line commands and that's because for the author it's way easier than trying to screengrab a capture of every single desktop environment. They are trying to explain how to do things graphically because generally you can do them graphically but it's way more complex than just typing a command.
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That's my time dev's, see you next time, Happy New Year & Happy Coding
Top comments (14)
Hardware being unsupported is a risk, not a chance. It's also very rare that there are no drivers available, either you're sitting on non-standardised newly released stuff or very old.
Have you met many developers that are surprised that applications aren't always easy to cross compile?
Yes there are many, most of the beginners when starting with Linux have the same query
Nice article, I agree with the points you have provided. The only thing which annoys me while reading a little bit is lack of interpunction.
Regarding the topic:
At work I'm forced to use Windows as I work with SAP system which client is not supported on Linux at all. I was trying to do "the switch" on personal computer, but I've always ended with going back to Windows. I've tried different distros and even stayed for about a year with PopOs! which I totally loved! The thing is always the same - after evaluating the Linux for some time I end up with totally broken system and I'm not talking about hardware/driver stuff. E.g. I try to implement rice found on the Internet with step-by-step tutorial on the same distro and somehow I end up with missing dependencies. Trying to add missing packages ends up with the system not working or I can't for example update different application because other app created some error which now doesn't allow for any apt-get update.
I agree, I had no problems at all running favorite games (both through Steam and Wine) and one time installations were great. It's just evaluating the system for quite some time (and no, I wasn't passing every command with sudo) makes the system unusable for me later on.
To be honest, I like the Linux feeling and developer compatibility and would love to stay for much longer, but each time I make the switch, I end up going back to Windows after around half an year. And yes, Windows is slower, less customizable, less secure and spying a lot (if not handled correctly) - but it works 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
First of all sorry for the grammatical mistakes, as I am not a native English speaker so still learning to write perfectly.
As far as you problem is concerned, this is the same thing ever guy faced when they newly switched their platform.
I will suggest you to give Ubuntu Budgie a shot. At beginners level this would a great choice, when you will get comfortable with you can switch to anything of your intrest.
Good luck, Happy Coding 🎉
I finally made the jump to Linux desktop last year. I spent a lot of time making sure I could still do my work before doing so, and made sure there was a reasonable amount of entertainment available as well. Some thoughts:
I can think of very few things in the last year that haven't been possible due to my running Linux. However, the point is taken - things will not run exactly the same. And expecting things to be identical to another OS defeats the purpose.
Exactly, you can do all the stuff with Linux, And Linux has alternative of all. Like for MS Office Linux have Libre Office. Just dig into the things, don't give up easily, Happy Coding 🎉
You'd be surprised the amount of Windows programs that run absolutely fine with Wine. I rarely have trouble running Windows stuff at all
Yeah I agreed, even all the software nowadays is compatible with Linux. And if they are not you can make them by doing some small settings change. But a newbie hesitates to change anything and generally switch to another distros for some minor reasons.
I have been on Linux for 7 years now I must say I am never going to Windows or Mac unless is a work laptop which is Windows and painful everyday to use to be honest, I also used Mac but the only dope thing is I was able to run my C projects lol.
That meme was too good 😆
Nice Article !!
PS - i have no complaint with India people/youtubers, I respect India and I think Indian are the most praised people in tech domain.
Yeah I am from India so you can be sure I just took it as a joke
I miss Kubuntu(my choosen distro). I loved the struggle to find linux alternatives of tools I need. For some reason using wine was not satisfactory.
Im back @ windows because I cannot find any BIM-CAD linux natives without spendin 2 weeks configing it to work and/or a 6month learning curve.
FreeCad, BricsCaD is the best I found... close to Revit/autoCad
As a daily use O.S Linux is still pretty raw, I only use it as a dev env