This. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I tend to think you can secure yourself some of the gains without rooting your phone, but it’s a lot of twiddling and an ecosystem swap.

I loathe apple, but if you’re not ready to dive in, your home devices are where I would start. Routers, modems, home PCs, learn how to set up encryption and redirection to put things behind. Ditch your roomba.

Edit; I did not mean to talk down, sounds like your on that train. Android is linux and adb is awesome (sometimes).

Keepassdx/xc and syncthing have been awesome, rise up has a decent free VPN client for public use in fdroid.

I mean it predates a lot of the pervy anime, but Usenet looked the same at the start with lots of Unix/computer boards and an alt.

Computer enthusiasts gonna enthusiastically talk about computers. People who pick up and move to a new platform are likely to be united around being technically competent enough to get there first, and everything else second.

Definitely worth running through vim tutor at least once.

It’s beyond typing speed, things like piping out strings to utilities is using one program to write another, you aren’t just getting faster because of access, it’s a paradigm shift.

Edit just for fun: im a non Dev dummy who happened to grow up in a Unix household. Even having dropped vim for helix and bounced around the MS admin/Apple IT space for 30+ years. When I switched to Linux I could still remember binds I’d set up and last used at 9.

Kinda like riding a bike.

Efficiency.

There’s 0 chance if you have to pick up your mouse that you can keep up with a Unix gray beard.

That’s just editing, if they’re from the emacs era there might be nothing you can do with text faster across their whole system.

I like vscode as a entry point, but if you care to get faster learning just vim motions and sys utils alone is going to cut time from the process.

This is incredibly true. The hardware manufacture process is a slow turning and cost centric wheel, but it’s always forward looking. If it doesn’t exist today you are building around compromises made outside the scope of your concerns.

Anyone whose had to work on DEC or Sun hardware can describe in excruciating detail about how minor implementation differences in hardware cascade down the chain. (Missing) Rubber washers determined a SAN max writes once, lest the platters vibrating cause the chassis to walk across the floor.

‘Universal’ support is always a myth, and carving up what segment to target is shooting one moving target while standing on another one unless you have exclusive control of implementation of the whole chain (apple).

From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.

So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.

Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.

I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.

The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.

Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.

Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.

These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.

I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.

Even if you’re right, those organizations still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing.

It’s not a quick solution, but the answer is more education about the space, so that there are more voices.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

I ended up on a first gen dell developer xps and didn’t win the Intel nic lottery. Dell’s Ubuntu repo bricked my laptop a dozen times til I moved to arch, which actually had the decency to include the broadcom driver.

The hardware is alright, but the total lack of effort in maintaining has been from the jump.

+1 here for the arch recommendation as an ex ms sys op. Browsing their repos was outstanding for retooling, most of the config problems you hit are a great way into the ecosystem.

It’s crazy how far this extends. I have fewer problems on my 5k atom series laptop GPU/CPU after fooling with a few of the settings than with an nvidia 2k card.

No issues with either full Intel or amd stacks a decade old.

Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.

There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.

Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.

I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.

Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.

Too many options to learn a new language.

If you’re the type of person with an opinion on on how software should work, there are options to make it happen.

It’s been my first trip back in a decade, just looking through my options in the core repo these days has made me giddy. I worked for years as a Windows environment sys admin, half my tools went out the window for directly better options almost immediately.

Most of the open source software you’ll find had someone who thought there was a big enough issue to roll up their sleeves, so lots of the projects are answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet too. The entire orientation puts fixing things ahead of profiting off them.

Things like this make me wish the traditionally anti government party wasn’t a bunch of loonies, because they’d be the ones pushing this to public conscious in a way that might move the needle.

I don’t doubt the intentions of (some) progressive members of government, but they’re outgunned and have a long list of priorities. Getting legislation to reverse this isn’t coming from corporatists, the infinite retention is going to seem like a feature to business.

Thank you, added to the list. Gonna tear up some disks spinning up all these VMs.

I’m less worried on an intro to Arch than I am being able to just standardize on the same repos I’m already staring at when I inevitably have to answer questions over the phone. I know a few people like my dad (lapsed unix) who could afford to remember what it’s like outside of the walled garden, but too much friction is going to drive them off, ui or otherwise.

I actually started looking around for this myself as a way to recommend some easier intro points.

I’ll have to take a look at popos from the comments, but anyone have any experience with how well maintained Manjaro is these days?

Hopefully healthcare.