1. Linux is not Windows

Do not expect things to work as they do in Windows.

2. The terminal is not to be feared (it only bites when told to)

While you can get most things done via a GUI option using the Terminal is much more powerful and gives more information.

3. Not all hardware works with or works well with Linux

This pertains mostly to Laptops and peripherals, but always do a quick Google search to check for any issues.

One of the big issues for people is sound, a lot of computer & parts makers like to use the cheapest no-name parts they can because Windows lets them require “drivers” aka software fixes for poor hardware whereas Linux tends to give unaltered output leading to complaints about sound quality.

4. Not all software works on or works well on Linux

You are not going to find software from Adobe, Microsoft office 365 etc running on Linux even using WINE.

Some games will not work on Linux even using the Proton compatibility software.

5. Linux software is often lacking in the visuals but has lots of options under the hood.

There is a lot of software made for Linux are made by devs who focus more on the under the hood performance than making the software GUI look pretty. So don’t be put off by the looks of a lot of Linux software.

6. Alternative to is a great website.

I highly recommend Using the Alternativeto website to (as the name implies) find alternatives to software you use on Windows.

7. Backup’s are your friend

Setup an external device be it an internal hard drive, external hard drive or NAS as a backup target for your files.

You can use Timeshift to backup the entire drive (and it can reload a chosen backup directly onto the drive), Lucky backup to sync specified folders (either one way or both ways) to your drives or as I do use both.

And backup before doing major updates.

I have Timeshift setup to backup the entire drive (including $home) to a separate internal HDD and Luckybackup set to backup my important folders to an external USB HDD.

8. Accidents will happen

As you are learning how to use and navigate you will have accidents that will require a full reinstall, don’t fear this has happened to everyone else and why you backup your files so it’s an annoyance instead of the end of the world.

Ctrl+R to search your bash history. I hate how long I went without knowing this, so I’ve always got to spread the word about it.

My main recommendation is this - The more techsavvy you are, the harder a switch to Linux will be, because you know how to do some complex things on Windows, and now you’ll have to relearn it on Linux.

Take your time, Google lots, and just know the ceiling on Linux is much higher for power users, so getting over the initial hump will reward you greatly

do not copy paste commands you do not uderstand from shady forums in hope it will solve your problem :)

Try a few distros before settling down - setting things up a few times is a good way to get to know the ins and outs better. Try something other than plain Ubuntu - I really enjoyed Mint and PopOS personally, both of which are forks of Ubuntu. In my first 6 months I tried around 4-5 different Ubuntu family distros, and that was such an important learning experience for me.

If you want to use wine, get bottles instead of running plain wine. The dependencies are much easier to manage, and you can run separate configurations of wine. As I know from personal experience, the sandboxing also helps prevent you fucking your computer up.

On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

Look up some terminal games - there are a few that are designed to help you learn. I don’t remember the names (I’m down to track them down later if that would help), but in particular I remember an SSH-based file searching game and a folder exploration dungeon crawler themed game.

Learning commands is less useful than understanding how Linux is setup, but it’ll all come together with time - just keep playing around with it and learning new things.

My advice is to search the Internet for some good resources on how to learn the Bash programming language, or else the “POSIX shell” (which is very slightly different from Bash). This is the command line language used by most Linux distros by default. POSIX shell is a complete programming language with built-in data structures, control flow like conditionals (if statements) and loop syntax such as for and while, and function composition by way of shell pipes. Combine these with tools like find and grep and you can accomplish quite a lot with just a single line of code.

Also, I highly recommend you practice using Vi or Vim as a text editor until you get somewhat fluent. It isn’t strictly required, but I recommend it simply because most people who use Linux as their daily driver also use these tools, and it helps a lot when communicating with other people in the Linux community, especially when it comes to solving problems. You want some fluency in using apps that the majority of people in your community are using. Also it is a good place to practice writing shell scripts.

Also not required, but learn a bit about Emacs as well. Learn how to use Dired (an Emacs app for working with ls output interactively), learn how to open an edit a file from Dired, learn how to run find and grep from within Emacs. Learn how to run shell commands in Emacs and capture their log output. Also learn a bit about how to use Org-mode. (Shameless plug: I have my own series of blog posts on how to do these things.) This handful of basic skills will get you a very, very long way.

I can’t comment much on customizing Cinnamon, but Cinnamon uses the Gtk toolkit, and so you can use any of the good Gtk themes out there to customize Cinnamon. Check out the UnixPorn community for more in-depth advice on that topic.

Honestly, one of the best things you could do is use Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. It’s a lot more new user friendly.

Do NOT add too many third party repos, they’re a pain in the ass to remove later.

Try distrobox.

With the terminal, use the option --help or view it’s man pages with man (command you want to know more about) to avoid having to search the Internet just to find out how commands work. You may find the terminology of certain things strange or may not understand how certain things are described at first, but you’ll have a much better understanding of how everything works when you know how to look up what exacly something does. Oh and in man use u and d to scroll up and down and /(searchword) to search, that makes looking up stuff a lot faster, press q or Ctrl-D to quit

regarding WINE, there’s tools like Bottles that make managing WINE easier. Steam in general configures WINE for you which meant in my experience you never need to mess with WINE directly, which is nice.

Don’t chmod recursively on a whole lot of files if you don’t know what you are doing. Also rm is a very powerful command, be wary. Lastly, piping to grep can be very helpful.

I just started using Linux

Welcome!

I have not tried running WINE yet but I plan on doing so soon.

Don’t feel pressured in any way to use Wine. Sure; if you’re in need of certain software that’s only available on Windows, then feel free to engage with Wine to get said software working on your system. However, note that a lot of alternatives exist, so make sure to check them out through something like alternativeto.net before getting involved with Wine.

What are some really important basic commands I can use to start branching out into Terminal command structures and learning more about how I can edit and customize my computer?

Broad question; arguably it makes sense to start out with something like linuxjourney.com if you haven’t yet. After which, you might proceed to plunge deeper into some of the subjects that have been introduced through more expansive resources. Assuming that you might prefer something like a video guide of sorts; it’s worth pointing out that the videos made by the Learn Linux TV channel on YouTube are excellent. One might argue that the ArcoLinux distro might be worth exploring as a platform to learn Linux on; it’s literally one of its design goals. Though, once again, you shouldn’t feel pressured in any way to use a certain distro to learn Linux on. We’ll delve into distros later on.

And if Cinnamon has shortfalls or weaknesses that I may run into eventually, what are some good alternative distros that I could leapfrog to eventually?

Cinnamon is just a Desktop Environment, and it happens to look and function close to how Windows does, which is one of the main reasons it is often recommended to newer users that seek a familiar experience. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Cinnamon, really. Though, it’s worth pointing out that it’s not one of the top dogs in the realm of Desktop Environments; those would be GNOME and KDE. Those two have put in considerable work and effort to have proper Wayland support, which we’ll call the ‘successor’ of X11; this is a very oversimplified description and thus somewhat false, but it would be out of scope for this comment to delve deeper into this. What’s worth pointing out is that Cinnamon -due to its reliance on X11- is (very likely) to be deprived of features like HDR support and superior security standards as long as they don’t put in the necessary time and effort to get proper Wayland support for themselves.

In case your question was meant to ask if Ubuntu LTS is the best platform/distro to learn Linux on, then the only correct answer would be that it depends on your needs. Ubuntu is definitely a decent choice, but you’re not protected from unintentionally borking your system when you try to install Steam. Jokes aside, even though Pop!_OS is only based on Ubuntu and thus I don’t know for 100% sure if said bug stems from Ubuntu or Pop!_OS, it’s still worth pointing out that this is not necessarily a very bad showing for Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. Unfortunately bugs happen, though it’s great to have a system that might be better protected…, though unfortunately nothing comes without a cost… compromises… compromises…; moving on.

In case you’re interested to explore other distros, perhaps take a look at distrochooser.de. It’s not exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s decent as a first orientation. If you share your result, then we might even give our opinion on the matter based on said results. If you do end up sharing the result, consider answering the following questions as well (feel free to give non-binary answers):

• Sane defaults or Blank slate?
• Full control or Little to no control?
• Secure or Convenient?
• Tool to get work done or Tool to explore/play around?

any great tips?

You might come across a piece of software that’s not available within the repo of your distro. However, if you know that it’s available in another distro’s repo, then perhaps you should use Distrobox (or similar container-solutions) to access said software. Refer to videos on YouTube if you’re interested to know how it works, though its documentation is quite excellent as well.

It’s a little contradictory but make use of the amazing community and don’t listen too much to the community. People are really helpful but you will hear stuff like “don’t use that distro” or “don’t use that desktop environment” a lot just because people in the community value those things and love to fight which is the best. You have to figure out what works best for you and not someone else! Still, the community is increadably helpful and there is someone to answer basically every question you have so never be afraid to ask stuff and welcome to the endless rabbithole! ;)

The Linux community is indeed remarkable, but the multitude of available distributions can sometimes give an impression of fragmentation. When you discover the distribution that best fits your needs, it’s important to remember not to take it personally. Avoid developing a bias towards your chosen distribution as it could potentially lead to unnecessary conflicts with others who prefer different distributions within the community.

I suggest to watch the package manager commands (probably ‘apt --help’) and use it for your packages. Package stuff is what I use the most in the terminal.