this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
69 points (86.3% liked)
Linux
45530 readers
1090 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A linux distro is a linux distro. It’s you, who invests the time to experiment and understand, who unlocks advanced features. There’s no shortcuts to learning Linux than to use it and read about it and install it many many times.
Exactly. You can use Ubuntu in a noobish way, or you can do crazy things with it. It's not the tools, but the craftsman that makes the difference.
That said, distros each have a niche, so find the one that's closest to the types of problems you want to solve. For example, if you're making a kiosk, you're probably better off pushing out your own images, so a distro that's designed to build small images is probably desired over one that seeks to pack in every library and application under the sun.
If you don't know what you want, pick something well supported and dig in to whatever interests you. Want to learn systemd? Pick a distro that uses it and write your own service files (e.g. maybe a Minecraft server, or perhaps synching). Want to learn to build software yourself? Grab a tarball from the project's page instead of installing through the package manager. And so on. If you start from something unfamiliar, you'll have to learn a lot of irrelevant things, which may not be what you want.