10mo ago

Sometimes a good way to 'learn Linux' is to use a WM

I have been using Linux for about 5 years and although I don't consider that I know much, I know enough to fix my own problems and that's usually enough for me.

Since Plasma 6 was announced I wanted to test something other than XFCE, Gnome or Plasma (or any DE) so I give it a try with ArcoLinuxD i3wm and is increible the amount of things I learn the 'hard way' because there was no GUI to do the things I want to do, or maybe I was too lazy to do it with the terminal since there is always the 'easy way'.

Things that might be very easy for a lot of people, but I never take the time to learn, like mounting drives, running programs from startup, setting environment variables, creating desktop entries, and a lot of other things I didn't even remember. I even learned to use things that used to give me a headache just looking at it, like Vim, xdg, the Archwiki (that is super useful) and the manpages.

It's ironic because something that started as an experiment is now my daily drive, and now that Plasma 6 has been released, I don't want to leave i3 behind.

27 comments

It doesn't really matter which distro you use, all hail the Arch wiki!
PS: if you use ddg, !aw is your friend here
- Well that's marvelous.
  And yes, the above is not a joke. The Arch wiki is so dependable that I will often go there first, or prioritize their links in search results, for projects that don't actually involve Arch.
- It's nice that Arch is providing an easier installation method, it's counter-productive for many users to have to contend with such detail just to have a functioning system.
- how did I not know about !aw? Thanks for the tip, will be very useful

Or just never learn linux, use it.
I want to use my OS to do my job; I don't want my OS to be my job.
- Yeah, when I do something a lot I sometimes bother to learn to do it faster. Otherwise I don’t. I love the high skill ceiling to linux, but I also love that the floor keeps lowering.
  I quit years back because the floor was too high. I got back in after it lowered. I use my computer for a lot of things, but I’m not really fucking around with it to fuck around. I have things I want to do, and it’s best when it’s easy to learn how to do them

This was exactly my experience when I switched from XFCE4 to Hyprland. Now I much rather do everything in the terminal. Except for partitioning drives and auto mounting them. I switch to gnome to do that in GUI.
Using nixos I can just rebuild with gnome instead of hyprland. Do what I need. Then rebuild back to hyprland. And gnome is not installed anymore. So I get to use GUI without the bloat of having a GUI installed all the time.

This is why we recommend Linux Mint to beginners!

i totally get you there! I have been piddling around with proxmox for a month or so now, and learning docker, I don't even have to put portainer on every instance i set up these days!
I am excited for plasma 6 though for sure! I reckon i'll spin up a VM to try it out!
- I've been interested in getting into Proxmox. How does it compare to Portainer?
  
  Well,
  Portainer puts a GUI on top of running docker. Which lives in the terminal usually.
  Proxmox puts a GUI on a Debian Linux build specifically made to stand up VMs and Linux containers, which I then put docker ( and sometimes portainer) on
  Proxmox seems awesome!

Yeah, you learned the tiny bits and pieces of a desktop that you took for granted before. Like trays, notifications, locking, screen saver, etc. Just for the learning experience, any daily driving linux users should at least try to setup a fairly functional desktop environment using bare WMs as the base.

27 comments