What are some things you wish you had known when switching to Linux?

That after getting used to Linux I will hate to be forced to use less free operating systems.
- This so much. I absolutely cannot stand Windows anymore.
  
  Windows is so bad
  
  I could but I always get a feeling like I'm being monitored constantly. Like imagine being at work and if you don't move your mouse for a few minutes you'd get a warning or something. Or remember using a computer at school where the teacher could literally see the screen of every student, yeah like that.
- Once you go FOSS, you never go back.

How to quit vim.
- Just read this book:
- Used to use gedit, the found nano and it was awesome. Then found Vim... I RAN back to nano haha
  
  Try micro.
  It's much better and quite easy if not easier to use than nano. It should really be the default simple editor.
  
  I hear you 😁. For whatever reason I stuck with the Vim tutorial and did it a few times over the years. Now I'm using the IdeaVIM extension in IntelliJ - that mode system is just sooo powerful. It has a horrible learning curve, yes, but if you manage to stick with it, it pays huge dividends. I probably know, like, 18% of all commands, and it completely changed how I edit files (mostly for coding, but also text).
- I remember, back in the day, I asked on IRC how to edit a file in Linux. Someone said vi. Little did I know that in chat someone said, the next question is how do I quit. I asked that exact question. Yes chat erupted.
- Either by making it segfault or you don’t.
  I got a whole software developer career going out of my attempts to exit vim.
- I vaguely remember pressing Alt+F4 while trying to close vim in a terminal once. It did switch to me login prompt so I thought it worked.
- For people who actually don't know this, yet: Type :x.
  This means “eXit, save any changes”
  If you want to leave and discard your changes, type :q!
  The :q means “Quit”, without any other instructions. This will warn you if you changed anything, adding ! means “force this command”.

I guess the main things would be:
As a beginner, don't bother trying to dual boot -- If you still need a Windows box, get some cheap hardware to do your Linux work on. It's too easy to screw up both systems otherwise.
Don't get too hung up on a specific distro, the better you are at dealing with different configurations, the better prepared you will be for whatever comes. Once you've gotten one set up, don't be afraid to just try a different one.
- I never had a problem dual booting, even as a beginner. I always kept everything on two separate drives, though, each with their own EFI partition.
  
  I kept them on the same drive, different EFI partitions.
- I did the opposite, have always dual booted my laptops and had win on my PC until quite recently now that I'm comfortable enough not to need a safety net anymore

The 1:1 windows:Linux replacement is just a means to keep you on Windows. Once you learn Linux, you'll come to understand how much of a farce it is and how it's designed to keep you away
- Linux is a farce and designed to keep you away? Could you elaborate?
  
  No, i think he means the idea that Linux is supposed to substitute Windows 1:1

That I could put /home on a different drive
That I would never boot into Windows again so having partitions for it was a waste of time
That mounting drives with their uuid as the mount location is insane
- That mounting drives with their uuid as the mount location is insane
  Why tho? Kernel sometimes can index drives in different order (if you have multiple drives), screwing your mount locations. But UUID is always the same
  
  You can give your partitions labels and mount by label. Labels are persistent, like UUIDs, but are also easier to remember and copy.
  
  It's just really long is all. I wish I had given it something shorter but descriptive.

I learned to never settle. If you don't like the default workflow of Gnome, try some extensions, or even a different DE. Same with Package Managers. If you don't like the syntax, make an alias. Don't just "deal with it". Windows has brainwashed people into thinking that there is only one way to do a thing.
- This is kinda funny to me because I hadn't realized how terrible the Windows workflow was for me until Gnome 3 came out.
  Ever since, while I'll use extensions for stuff like alphabetical app grid and Caffeine, I never do anything that changes the Gnome workflow. It's not for everyone, but it absolutely is for me.
- Its why I always find it funny when people complain about changes to the start bar, because surely there isnt a bunch of 3rd party options in existance that change it, and can mimic 7's start bar.
  
  I have heard that shell replacements are often very buggy on Windows.
- See I've run into an issue now where I like and am used to GNOME, but I also want to try a tiling WM and doesn't seem like there's really a good way to do that in gnome
  
  You can install the tiling WM and try it seperately. Might even be possible to combine them too, but that might get pretty involved and hacky since Gnome doesn't like it when you stray from "the path" that they deem correct.
  
  Oh you poor soul. :(

Trying not to make it windows.
There's a lot of conveniences that Windows comes default with.
When I switched to Linux, my immediate goal was to find alternatives for EVERYTHING. That lead to being disappointed by a lot.
Understanding Linux and also recognizing there's a lot of shit I don't need (that windows was giving me for the sake of VALUE) was a game changer.
- Understanding Linux and also recognizing there's a lot of shit I don't need (that windows was giving me for the sake of VALUE) was a game changer.
  This 100%! After using Linux for the past few years I've realized a lot of the crap windows has by default is stuffed in there to have something to market.
- Nowadays there's a lot of good alternatives for everything, including windows hello for any password prompt

It was free, I could not afford a Sun workstation and Minix had problems, so when this Finnish guy wrote in Usenet that he was working on a free kernel/OS, it was cool!
- Same!
  
  The biggest bonus to the democratic world stems from just one individual. And the rest of the world believing in his idea.
  So never say that just you cannot make a difference in this world.
  Because you can!
- 386BSD was a thing back then too, but there was the AT&T lawsuit that scared everyone away. That gave Linux an opportunity.

Linux is pretty easy to use nowadays. The only thing I would check before switching is driver compatibility.

"20 years from now, people are still discussing moving to Linux!"
- People who wanted Linux on the desktop to be so user-friendly their grandma could use it are now grandparents.
- And 20 more years there will still be people switching
  
  There will be dozens more people switching. Dozens!

Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.
- Installed distrobox on NixOS because I was worried being limited to only nixpkgs and have not touched it once lol
  Same goes for the windows VM except for the time I needed to run excel macros for work
  
  Worried about being limited to only the biggest selection of packages available. Does not compute.
  
  Thats been a fear of mine moving to nixos. Glad to know it'll cover most of my software needs.
  
  I did on my Nix, there was a package in Nixpkgs that was outdated, so I had the opportunity to use distrobox for that, at leqst temporarily until they update the package.
- So enjoying immutable fedora with AUR support. Cannot be overstated...
  
  Yeah, Arch Linux is beautiful as a container OS. I use it all the time.
- Am I reading the readme correctly in that I can run apt-get within distrobox on Fedora, and not be limited to dnf packages?
  
  You can install Distrobox on Fedora (or any of the distros that support it), create a Debian distrobox on your Fedora install, and within the Debian distrobox you can use apt-get to install whichever Debian package you like. Or..., you could make an Arch distrobox and even install stuff from the AUR. Or really any package from any of your favorite distros as long as it's supported.
  
  Yes!

tab completion in bash
vim
zfs
git (though it didn't exist then)
- I wouldn't use ZFS. Too risky. If a new kernel comes along and ZFS fails to build or something, my system will be unbootable.
  Btrfs scratches my copy-on-write/checksum/integrated RAID itch well enough anyway.
  
  Nix and ubuntu have in kernel support. Void's module build system also prevents this situation. I use nix and void, so have never faced this problem.
- a real og
- I've been fuckin with btrfs so far haven't tried zfs yet. Anything cool compared to btrfs?
  
  In contrast to btrfs it doesn't break your data. Everyone learns the hard way not to use btrfs...
  
  I gave up on btrfs when Icouldn't recover from a full disk situation (years ago, may be better nwo). But zfs tooling is so good, reliable and intuitive, I'd not want to switch anyway.

Rasberry Pi or other NUC is a great way to begin.
- By the time you've dressed out an Rpi to be halfway usable, you've spent about as much as a decent NUC. And all you have to show for it is a slow-as-mud sd card, hardly any video acceleration, a USB stack that only crashes sometimes, a busy OOM killer, and no software.
  Get an N95 based nuc. A Beelink with 8/256 runs about $150, and it just works. (Well, you might need pcie_aspm=off).
  
  yeah, RPI is just 'cookbooked' due to fixed hw

Unmounting removable drives after writing to then is crucially more important than on Windows
- It's pretty important on Windows too, though. Always “eject” or “safely remove hardware” before unplugging!
  
  Not in Windows 10/11. You can still "eject" if it makes you feel better, but it's basically redundant. They reworked the support for removable media so they are always ready to remove except during active read/write operations.
- How so?
  
  On Windows, I often simply took out the USB drive without "safely removing" it. The data was there 99% of the time. On Linux, if I'm not mistaken, unmounting the drive before disconnecting is what actually writes data to it.

I wish I'd known how much of a pain in the ass having an NVIDIA card would be. I would have gotten a different computer.
- Same. I bought my GPU at like 170% of its MSRP. I regret it now, should have went the amd way
- VA-API trouble intensifies

To start sooner.

Don't get an Nvidia gpu
- @flamingopinyata
  This is such an underrated comment. Linux hates, hates, hates NVidia. I've spent 24 hours trying to get two applications running, both of which consistently complain about my GPU and Hardware Acceleration.
  @elfahor
- Can confirm. Don't do it guys. Hardware acceleration for video decoding just doesn't work for me.

It was ~20 years ago so my advice to myself then would be pretty irrelevant now. I messed up my laptop, and my advice then would have been don't start with a laptop (because laptop compatibility was lacking back then compared to desktop, different times).
- Laptop compatibility still sucks at times, especially with weird configurations of amd apu and nvidia gpu laptops... or maybe it's just my skill issue.
  
  NVIDIA's contempt for the Linux community is legendary. Definitely not a skill issue.
  
  Skill issue
  Nah but seriously Nvidia loves to make it difficult and Linux doesn't make it any easier. It's like an unstoppable force meets an unmoving object

When you're just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don't look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don't distro hop just to see what you're missing.
Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you're trying to get work done.
- Is Pop!_OS really that popular? I started using Linux about 10 years ago and it wasn't around then, so I never tried it in my distro hopping days. I see it's developed by System76 so I can see why you'd choose it on their hardware, but is there any point doing that on other hardware?
  
  The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I've never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).
  That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of "opinionated" good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it's easy to go along with the "happy path" and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines--including machines not of their own brand. (I've contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they've always sent it through a code review and QA process).
  
  Idk, it seems to be picking up steam. It's what I use unless I'm trying to use something super lightweight.
  For me it has the stability of Ubuntu without having to use Ubuntu.
  Haven't tried Debian yet though.
- When you're just trying to get work done: pick Windows.
  
  I've gone Arch for this year's linux adventure. It has been the most stable I've ever tried.

That I shouldn't care as much about installed packages I no longer use. Sure, going through installed programs and cleaning up from time to time is ok, but no need to panic if something sticks around.
Especially when I installed something manually needing dependencies for programming, I tend to write down names of installed packages and then managing it manually, because I wasn't yet aware what their names mean. Now using same OS for over a year, heavly testing stuff, having multiple desktop enviroments and not cleaning it up my system partition is taking less than 30GB, compared to 1TB disk it's nothing.

After switching to Linux I wish I knew how to report bugs. I'm a qa tester and I notice so many little things that can be replicated and fixing them would polish the user experience. But there are so many layers I don't know who to report the issue to. My first thought wasto report it to the distro forum and have the more technical people there take a look at the issue then escalate it to the distro maintainers or the actual software devs.
Another thing I wish I knew, was how to get my 2nd hdd to mount automatically. I fucked to my system 4 times(and recovered it) trying and then had to get my sys admin friend to do it for me.
- Reporting KDE bugs is still extremely inconvenient.
  There should be a 1-click option just to submit an automatically collected data dump, maybe with an optional text field we can write. Just to help providing some data, without all the hassle of creating an account, answering N questions, and following up with answers - sometimes I do care about the issue, most times I don't, but still want to flag that something wrong happened so they're aware of it.
  I have the impression that a lot of bugs and random crashes go unnoticed because users don't bother to go through the process of opening a bug report - and they shouldn't need to, nor know how to.
  
  My first time I was presented with the bug reporter I thought it was cool, but then it said I had to have all the debug symbols installed so it could unwind the call stack. Ok I thought, and searched apt for a little. But I couldn't find them all as there is not a standard naming scheme, so that effort was wasted. I wish their bug reporter would auto download all debug symbols needed.
- Bugs? We call those features around here!

Always put your filesystems in an LVM volume (and in general, partition disks with LVM rather than partition tables)! You never know when you might need to combine multiple disks, make a snapshot, add redundancy, or transfer to another disk without unmounting. But it's very difficult to format a block device as LVM once you can't erase its contents.
Make your /boot partition at least 500MiB.
Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk. You never know when you might need to add EFI and boot partitions to that disk. And again, it's very difficult to do after the fact.
- Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk.
  Shouldn't be needed these days. With GPT/UEFI you can just make more partitions at the end of the disk if needed. Back in MBR days that wasn't possible, as BIOS often needed things to be at the start of the disk to be found.

That even though you are running an LTS version of Ubuntu (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04), some packages that have arrived over a year ago on e.g. 23.10 will never arrive on 22.04.
Example: i3-wm 4.22 or up (https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=i3&searchon=names&suite=jammy§ion=all).
- This is mine. This is fine for my server, where I want it to be mega stable and always up. I can always add other repos for the few packages that I need to be up to date for whatever reason (podman for me recently). But my daily driver needs quicker updates than that.
- That's the whole point of an LTS distro. And it's why non-rolling distros for desktop OSes make no sense

TIL there's tab completion lol
- Tab completion, history, history search, you name it

That you can use any DE on any distro

Gnome is better on 1920 than in 1366. XFCE is better on 1366...
And Ubuntu sucks..
- Wow. Redmond theme.. 😂
  KDE seems hard for me. Personal Preference, it's hard to learn the flow, even it's near Windows Like Experience 😔

tab completion

Nothing, to be honest. It just worked and I loved it.

- Isn't it? I'm fairly sure I've flashed a windows iso a couple times from Linux before
- Just install BIOS updates from within the BIOS like a normal person.

Proper drive mounting process. When I finally learned, it was a life changer.
- Please explain. You make me wonder if I'm doing it wrong.

I've learnt how to use Linux in preparation for the day when Windows finally goes to far.

Ctrl + R in the terminal. I never used it until I got a job using Linux, now it's probably my most used command at work and at home.

If you switch to Linux you'll probably have to learn at some point to use the terminal but with some recent developments (new fonts, ligatures etc..) console applications evolved to be more and more ... Graphical! And this is awesome: check out btop, neovim/nvchad, lsd etc...

That just like windows and Mac if it doesn't support that platform prepare for headaches. Unlike windows and Mac you can get things that aren't supposed to run on Linux to run thanks to great tools like wine, proton, and even waydroid. But if you wanna avoid headaches just stick with what's supported for the most part.

Nothing of note, really. The openness of the whole system meant that I could learn whatever I needed to know as the need arose.
I started when I was a kid, though. I had plenty of time to explore and discover. It'd be harder as an adult in a hurry.

- I mean really if you don't like your current DE, you can always just switch within your own distro. For example, you can switch from cinnamon to gnome for mint.
- I like gnome but it doesn't support variable refresh rate (freesync). But I've made KDE look quite nice and works ok. It bring Linux there is almost always an option for your needs

It was so long ago there was nothing to know, really. Most pages looked fine in links, you had irssi for your social networks, mplayer for your movies (still great), mutt for email, vim for programming... It kind of just worked.
- That's pretty much where I've landed. Except I use firefox.
  
  I still use mplayer but now it's neovim will lots of plugins. Modern IDEs are much different today. Mutt is hard to use in the time of HTML emials. I also use lots of graphical apps like signal, Spotify, steam or libre office that didn't exist 20 years ago. I think getting it all to work is a bit more complicated now. Maybe I just use computer for a lot more things.

Though I enjoy and am currently using #LinuxMint, I wish I learned about #Wayland sooner. I didn't understand why game performance felt so off with my dual monitor setup for several months. I have since dabbled with an #Ubuntu #Gnome DE for some gaming, and Wayland support has alleviated those problems. However, I plan to look into other options when I've organized my data a bit more and establish proper backups. Learning #Bash, #scripting, #aliases, #workspaces and tweaking #hotkeys were also useful for making my workflow into what it is. Also, I wish I knew how bad #ProtonVPN and #ProtonDrive #Linux support would be. Despite getting used to their #CLI applications, the absence of feature parity is immensely disappointing.

Don't use linux with the expectation that it works like windows. If you want to use linux, be open to new ways of doing things, and you will likely have a great time, try the old methods and you will run into impassable walls.

I wish I'd known how to use node-based compositors like Natron to produce VFX so I don't have to keep going back to macOS to use After Effects.

how cool and sexy and irrestible i became
to the right people ^

That everything you need will work out of the box and you wouldn't boot into windows for 2 months. Would have done a full installing instead of dual-booting. Windows did have a matrix backup I needed though.

There isn't a hardware panel nor a proper task manager nor a GUI registery editor.
- There is no registry in Linux so there can't be a registry editor.
  Hardware panels and task managers do exist (and they come in more windows-like distros), they're just different to Windows ones. I do concede that hardware management in Windows is much easier.
  Task manager for Windows absolutely blows though. It doesn't show real data, just estimates that sometimes are wildly wrong.
- I disagree on the task manager. I like the KDE Plasma monitor application for instance. Very convenient way to sigterm or sigkill.
  
  Agreed, and if you're not on KDE then htop will do just fine.
- Well Linux doesn't have a registry, so an editor would also not exist, to be fair.
  
  dconf editor is kinda like regedit for GNOME apps ig?
  
  Not for long if Lennart has anything to say about it, I'm sure.
- htop
  
  Or even better, btop

@elfahor How I was fucked up by trade-based society. Linux is cheap( not free), but is fun and enjoyable. It us fun to interact, support and be brave to act.

No

that: aptitude >>>>>>> apt-get and apt
- It's a better foot-gun, that's for sure
  
  Nah; just takes time to get used to it! Awesome tool to solve dependencies problems!

That wine and proton are pieces of poo that i should have never bothered with, countless hours of diddling for next to no result
- Really? They always worked very well for me, with a bit of fiddling around
  
  i have no idea how, why or what is wrong it always feels like russian roulette but with 5 chambers filled im honestly envious to constantly hear hwo great proton and stuff is but for me it works like 1 out of 5 times, distro doesnt matter, all the results are the same
- I used to have this problem but not since the Steam Deck is out.
  Before, I was always frustrated fiddling with Lutris, winetricks, etc. But now it's only been plug and play for me, just let Steam take care of it. Zero compatibility issues. In fact, recently I've had more issues with native games than Proton.
  
  That or Bottles, that also takes care of a lot of the fiddly stuff.
  
  i have a pc, im not about to buy a console again any time soon especially when its a handheld that isnt exactly suited for anything than games that need a controller