These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

You should ping CERN or Fermilab about this. Or maybe the Event Horizon Telescope team but I think they used sneakernet to image the M87 black hole.

Anyway, my answer is probably just a SQL backup like everyone else.

chown changes the file owner. chmod changes permissions. So, if a file or directory is owned by root but a user should have access, you could make them the owner or you could keep root the owner and just allow read/write access.

They come up more on servers where you often have multiple users with different access levels. Some users might not have sudo permission but do have full control over their home directory and whatever else they need. And web servers, for instance, will usually have a user called www-data or similar and it’s shared by all the users in the “developer” group.

chmod is the command to change user permissions. The numbers mean user, group, and others and the value allows read, write, execute. So, 000 means no one has permissions to get rid of the mount point. 777 means everyone has all permissions. (4 is read, 2 is write, and 1 is execute and the numbers are added. So, 644 would mean you can read/write, the group and other users have read only access.)

You don’t have to use the numbers but eventually, almost every Linux admin does because it’s faster, a bit like a keyboard shortcut. But, for instance, you can add Execute permission with chmod +x /some/file/location.

Here’s more details on the how to chmod and the historic reasons for the 0-7 system (spoiler: it’s 8 bits): https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linux-file-permissions-explained

print “Fine. Fuck y’all.”

I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.

My only problem with both designs in your images is the colors. It’s a pretty standard part of UI design (in real life and on computers) that “red means cancel” and “green means continue.” Apple using blue is no big deal and I’m 90% sure they just use a user chosen “highlight color.” (Maybe Gnome as well?) But cancel or delete or similar things should probably be red or another color that signals “Stop.”

I’ve always thought Bootstrap, the web design library, has a good set of base colors. Red means danger. Light blue means info. Green means yes or success. Yellow means warning. Other buttons are a darker blue — basically the highlight color. (Not saying they chose the best version of those colors. Just that the general idea is consistency and what users most naturally expect.)

I don’t use KDE as my daily driver but it’s on my SteamDeck and I haven’t once been trying to change a setting or something and encountered a window that looks like Windows XP because no one at a whole multi-trillion dollar company could be bothered to update it. It’s way better than Windows 11.

Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?

Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.

If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.

I think it’s perfectly possible to use Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora without the terminal. But a lot of online tutorials are like, “Just run this command.” because it’s faster.

I’m an experienced terminal user but I know with my Steam Deck, I barely ever use it. Really the only time is when I want to update packages quicker than using the GUI tool. But you could successfully use a Steam Deck without ever launching into Desktop mode, much less opening a terminal.

This isn’t a guide but Linux Mint is a good stepping stone.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ If it’s just text, you can probably make a static HTML website and accomplish your goals. I’m not sure what format it’s in now but Markdown is what I use and then just export to HTML.

If you just want to host epub (or equivalent files), you can still make a static page and link to them with Cloudflare Pages, GitHub.io, or one of many free static page hosting sites.

It doesn’t have to be neofetch but even in my containers and docker stuff, I try to put a little message so I don’t fuck up something.

Running through a checklist is important. I learned that from a helicopter pilot at a bar but I do think it’s true in our field. It’s not life or death on a server but training yourself to go through a simple checklist (even if it’s just “make sure this is the right terminal tab”) is good advice.

I would say that you should check out Fedora as your first distro. Gnome is more like Mac than KDE (which is also great). Fedora is also built off Red Hat Enterprise Linux so it’ll will prepare you for server environments and your future career. You can learn bits of both at once.

I think it benefited my career to go in that direction. I (like everyone) distro-hopped and went through a phase where I customized everything and installed a new distro every few months. But if you learn the ins and outs of Fedora you’ll be well-positioned to manage RHEL and related servers. Debian is also a good choice for that, at least in the U.S.

And there’s nothing wrong with developing on a Mac while you use Linux for server stuff. Server level code will probably run on Linux but I found that using a Mac helped me when building front-end code because macOS devs tend to be design-forward. And don’t forget that you’re building something for other people. I barely use Windows but I try to revisit it every so often to see how the other half lives.

I stand corrected. I didn’t really use macOS until a few years ago.

I originally got a MacBook because my work life is all Linux and I was working from home and needed that psychological separation. Like, “This computer is for work. MacOS is for watching basketball.”

macOS does have a setting to remap the caps lock key and game has to recognize game sometimes. They stole the good ideas from Gnome. But if I can’t hit CAPS Lock+tilde and have a real terminal slide down, your operating system is dead to me.

I’m sure I can get there on Windows if I cared to but I’m too busy deleting Candy Crush or whatever.

The bottom line is that when I really need macOS, it’s built into the settings. Gnome is effortless. Windows is a constant battle.

The macOS version of it also sucks because you can’t close windows from “Mission Control” or whatever they call they call their Gnome clone. Put an X on each window whereas Gnome lets me do that and clear old shit out the way when I need to.