From the sound of things, absolutely not.
The only good beginner distros are the super popular ones where you can find a lot of advice online on how to fix it if you break something or guidance on doing common tasks.
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Hm. I suppose it could be of people whomst have already got a hold of how to do this stuff just by themselvesโฆ
void linux is a non-systemd OS, so uh, HELL NO. Systemd is the init system / service manager / optional bootloader / kitchen sink for most distros, and it genuinely does a lot of heavy lifting to make linux usable by normal people. if you want to use linux for the first time please just use fedora or ubuntu or popos or mint.
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Didnโt you tell us before to avoid debian-related distros like mint or pop apparently?
โฆAs long as youโre aโฆ
โฆProbably.
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Is Emacs hard to learn?
If I get out of depression and go programming again, I feel like I wouldnโt be much of a Linux user if I didnโt use Emacs.
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I found this page with some info on emacs:
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hot take: genuinely who cares if you use nano. If you want to ssh into a server both x11 and wayland have good support for running apps on remote machines connected over ssh (different ways to do it and x11 is better, if youโre going to learn a useless legacy technology, x11 is a fantastic candidate, its so insanely featureful, and it goes back ages.) and if you cant install apps you probably are just editing a few config files or whatever. (do learn how to use vi though some godforsake minimal installs only have vi)
so uh. net zero information response on my part uhhh. maybe just take the X11 recomendation, x11 is so cool, you can actually program x11 apps in asm with reasonable ease, few gui systems can do that, windowes can barely open a gui in c, and unlike all other modernish gui systems, you dont actually use anyone elseโs code: your asm interfaces with no libraries, it can be statically linked from exclusively your code.This is because its a network protocol.
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I think bjs wants to learn emacs cuz itโd make him a โtrueโ linux user?
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Not really. At least for the basic stuff. Literally the reason why I picked emacs over vim is that you can get by in emacs with the โnormalโ text editing shortcuts (though you need to learn the special cut/paste shortcuts and how to search, but basic moving around and deleting stuff + typing works the same as in any other text editor). So thatโs why I started learning emacs as you can actually use it within a few minutes of starting to use it (unlike vim).
Though @Deathwake is correct that you eventually have to learn vi because thatโs what you get by default on a server if you need to edit like the crontab or do a quick config file edit. I know just enough about vim keybindings to get through that task.
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ins
esc
:wq
character limit
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Is x11 โmore optionalโ to learn than vim?
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theyre radically different as technology. No one needs to know low level windowing APIs and wayland is more futureproof anyways, and everyone needs a text editor (which probably should include the basics of vi), i meant as an obscure obsolete thing to learn to feel more accomplished towards being a unix wizard.
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Btw youโre one of those โwizardsโ?
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Is Weyland supposed to be a reference to the Alien Franchise?
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No itโs an app updater thing for linux iirc
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I did not realize it was named after a town in Massachusetts.
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โฆNeither did I funfact
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incorrect. Wayland (with an a) is a graphics protocal, basically, it is the rules for how an app tells the operating system things like โplease open two windows for me, one as a pop up for the otherโ or โusing openGl to talk to the first available GPU, i want to draw 750 thousand triangles in the shape of a really detailed fish using thing 3d modelโ.
it can be used to talk to ANY supported OS, not just linux, freeBSD has decent support (though setting up freeBSD with graphics SUCKS, dont try), netBSD apparently has support but im not checking i dont hate myself that much, and windows allows apps running in WSL to use wayland to talk to linux which talks to windows.
The MacOS equivalent is called Quartz Compositor, the windows version doesnt seem to have an official name but it might be called desktop window manager (which would be a misnomer?? thats confusing microsoft doesnt understand names) and the current android system is called Surface Flinger (for some reason)
But wait! isnt android just linux? Shouldnt it use wayland? Uh, it could, but it doesnt. Wayland is not part of linux, it is a way for linux to have graphics, you can just uninstall wayland from your linux PC, and it will still โworkโ you just will only have access to the terminal and wont be able to run graphical apps. Surface Flinger is just another way to do that, and in fact, Linux and almost all other Unix-like-OSes (including MacOS i think??? excluding mobile devices ofc) support another, MUCH older system: X11
X11 comes from one of the many ill-fated research OSes to come out of academic or bell labs (in this case MIT). It was originally called W, for Windowing system, but when being modernized to run on more systems than just Athena (the unhinged network-based research OS), itโs sequel was renamed X (X being one letter further into the alphabet than W). X was seceded by, not Y, but X2. Then X3โฆ then 4,5,6 and eventually X11. Then finally it started getting ported to just about everything, graphical user interfaces becoming common outside of universities for once, and they stopped adding numbers, just slowly adding more extensions (originally all optional, some still optional, many now requirements to run on anything modern) and refining stuff. X stayed at version 11 for DECADES. no one wanted to make X12, that would be insane. X did, however, have a problem. It was made for computers from DECADES AGO. It sent ALL communication over the network (unix systems are smart enough to not send packets to themself over the network, and instead hand them to whichever program is waiting for them, though this is still not the fastest), and allowed the host PC with the actual GPU to be entirely unrelated to the system the app is running on, and it was optimized for 2D, and it was REALLY hard to get all the drawing done on a GPU, often wasting precious time sending the final drawn frame back to the CPUโs memory because apps are for SOME SECURITYLESS REASON allowed to view and edit raw pixel memory. A spicific problem i saw and wanted to bring up is that basically all modern linux apps would ask X11 to tell openGL or vulkan to draw soem triangles, then tell X11 to tell some other app that they drew that thing, then tell X11 to please give it the most up to date user input, then tell X11 it was done drawing so X11 could let the next app draw, the issue is, X11 isnt built for this! itโs build to draw text and 2D accelerated shapes and stuff, but everyone was just using it as a middleman to talk to other apps, and modern linux has MUCH faster ways to talk to other apps than through a buggy looped network pipe into an app that has to load fonts before it can draw. Waste of everyoneโs time.
Point being, Linux users in specific (im sorry FreeBSD users, you are a dying breed and are obsessed with keeping around obsolete systems) were tired of X, and wanted a sequel, not an X12โฆ but a Y.
Linux was finally ready to enterโฆ Y-land!!! (dramatic musical sting)
yeah i once heard something about how it was related to Weyland Yutani, W and Y being important letters, but given that I cannot source this claim at all, its spelled Wayland, and the reference compositor is called Weston (a town right next to the town of Wayland), it makes more sense that its just named after towns.
yeah iโve learned that like three times and forgot each time
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