The Best Way to Learn Linux

the absolute best way to learn Linux is to read the arch Wiki and the Man pages for the commands that you want to use now I know some of you might say oh but Kenny isn't Arch Linux an advanced Dro for elitist that beginners should stay far away from no that's not really the case sure there's some nerds out there who think that they're 200 IQ CIS admins because they memorized every single command to set up an arch box from scratch but now that Arch Linux ships with an automated installer there really isn't much in

the way of preventing a total Noob from installing Arch versus Linux Mint or Ubuntu as long as they don't have command line phobia and even then there's mangaro which does give you a gooey installer to get set up with what is pretty much an Arch Linux box a lot faster without touching the command line right away now you might be the kind of person who just thinks that they can't learn how to do things by reading a manual or reading a Wiki page and so so you prefer to watch a tutorial on YouTube or even

learn how to do things Hands-On now the Hands-On approach can really be useful especially if you have the resources to set up Linux in a virtual machine or run it on a spare computer because that way you'll be in no danger of running a random command that you saw on the internet that deletes your entire file system but when it comes to Linux YouTube tutorials I found that nine times out of 10 what you're getting is a a more verbose yet less detailed and often wrong version of the arch Wiki or a man page or

some other kind of written documentation for what you're trying to learn and that pretty much applies to everything I see so many hours long tutorials for programming languages and different technical things and like who the hell is even able to memorize every little detail from a 10hour plus C++ tutorial when you need to go back and reference something which will inevitably happen you're going to spend several minutes just scrolling through the YouTube timeline in order to find that section of the video and that's precious time that you could have spent dabbing on nerds with your

minimal htop screenshots so yeah man is unironically how a real man learns Linux but if you're like me and you lose yourself in giant walls of white text on a black background then you're going to love to have some kind of syntax highlight Lighting in Your Man pages and there's a few ways to go about this the approach that I like which doesn't require installing any new programs is to Simply use Vim for navigating Your Man pages instead of less you can do this by setting Vim or neovim as your man pager in your bash

RC like I did right here on line 14 and once you've done this when you go to run the man command for greet for example you're going to be navigating this manual in vim and this man page is going to inherit the syntax highlighting from your Vim theme and another benefit to this is that you have all of the navigation features of Vim at your disposal so if you wanted to Mark part of the document to jump back to it you can do that uh you can fold text inside of the document you can search

for regex patterns Etc so this gets you better-looking Man pages but Man pages themselves are still very very detailed like if I were to turn on line numbers and go to the bottom of this document for GP which I'm going to zoom out a little bit because it's too zoomed in uh you can see that it's almost 800 lines long and FFM Peg is even worse the full documentation for that command is over 40,000 lines long too long didn't read which is also the name of the next helper tool that I recommend installing there's several

different versions of tldr that you could use personally I prefer the teal deer implementation of it because this is a bit faster than most of the other tldr implementations and it's written in Rust so what more could you possibly want and this can be installed through cargo or through your systems package manager it's in the standard Arch Linux repository if you're running Arch by the way so make sure that you run tldr with two hyphens in order to update or pull in those pages before using teal deer the first time and you should also run

that if a tldr isn't available for whatever command you want a tldr for so if I run a tldr for FFM Pig for example we get a much shorter version of the man page with some of the more common examples that you would actually use same thing if I run tldr for grap again much version of it with the examples that you're most likely to use and this is in a very similar format to the cheat sheets that a lot of people love except this is available offline and it's available in your command line instead

of having to go through the browser to get it so this is a very very handy helper command to add to your Linux tool box now Man pages and tldrs for individual commands are very helpful but if you wanted to make some major changes to your systems they're probably not going to be enough like you're not going to find a man page for how to set up virtualization for example so that is where the arch Wiki comes in now obviously the arch Wiki is most helpful if you're actually running an arch-based system but 90% of

Linux dros are really the same and they just have differences like desktop environments which are fairly trivial I mean a desktop environment could be installed on any other drro the really big differences are when you start getting into different init systems which is why I recommend the archwiki because it's the most well-documented system D drro that's out there if you wanted documentation for a runit or an open RC drro then I would probably recommend going into the Gen to Wiki and just ignore the parts that are specifically about source-based systems if you're not using a

source based system the hyperland page in the arch Wiki is a pretty good example of what I'm talking about so this gives you a whole lot of information about hyperland and how to configure it and it has links to other things like the Wayland compositor for example because if you're going to run hyperland and you're currently on an X11 implementation then you're going to have to configure this first and you're going to have to read through the documentation to do that uh now just like the cheat sheets that we looked at earlier most people are

viewing this documentation the arch Wiki in their browser and the problem with that is the browser is a very high level piece of software that won't work unless your display server your desktop environment and your internet connection are all working correctly and there's a good chance that one or more of those things will break when you're making a major switch from like X11 to Wayland And hyperland so before doing anything like this install Wiki man to your system and download the arch Wiki or the Genty Wiki and Hell there's even documentation for free BSD if

you're running one of those systems now it's worth pointing out that these wikis can get kind of large the arch Wiki for example weighs in at 160 Megs I'm sure that most of you have enough free space for that because storage is cheap these days but I just thought it was worth mentioning so if I were to run wikman and then search for hyperland I always forget how hyperland is spelled h y p r l n d uh here we have the page for it and you can see if I zoom out a little bit

that this is exactly the same as what we saw in the arch Wiki on my browser and you got all the links to everything like if I go to uh installation and let's see like let's go into wlroots git for example these are all hyperlink okay so we can go into that page now and this is all being viewed offline this isn't using a a internet connection or anything like that as you saw I had it all downloaded onto my system and it's available in my terminal and it would also be available in a TTY

which is really important because like I said if you're trying to make a major change like switching display servers then there's a good chance that when you reboot all you're going to have is that text console and then troubl shooting at that point is going to be a lot harder because you're going to have to pull up the arch Wiki from another device and then you can't copy and paste commands it's a real pain in the ass if you've ever been there so check out these programs that I showed you today links to all of

them are in the video's description like and share this video to hack the algorithm and buy some of my merch from based. win 10% automatic discount is available at checkout when you pay in Monero XMR have a great rest of your day