Seeing that there are a ton of different Linux distros out there that can be created by literally anyone has got me thinking, has there ever been a Linux distro that was secretly malicious?

My friends are learning Linux through WSL, books, YouTube tutorials, and all that stuff.

Meanwhile, I'm just using Linux as my daily driver. Customizing my desktop, exploring things, breaking stuff, fixing errors, and copying commands from ChatGPT lol 😂

Sometimes I wonder, who's actually learning Linux faster?

They're learning the concepts first, while I'm figuring things out as I go.

Maybe I'm taking the longer route, but that's how I've been learning so far.

What's your take on this?

Hey 👋 (before my yapping I’m a real privacy focused user of the internet so don’t be surprised if what I want to do :)) I was thinking about switching from windows to Linux maybe Arch because of no telemetry could I set a duress pin like on graphene os or something similar to that could delete my system entirely after typing a special password?

Hey everyone!

I've been working with Linux professionally for about 3 years now. I spent 2 years in technical support and recently landed my first position as a Linux System Administrator. I also got my LPIC-1 certification.

Here's the thing that's been bothering me lately.

I feel like I have a decent understanding of Linux, I know the commands, I understand how things work, and I have the technical knowledge. But when it comes to actually sitting down and writing commands naturally in the terminal, I struggle.

I'm not talking about basic stuff like mkdir, touch, top, etc. Those are fine.

What I struggle with is combining commands and building more complex one-liners using tools like grep, sed, sar, seq, awk, pipes, and so on.

For example, I might know what each command does individually, but when I need to combine them to solve a real problem, my mind just goes blank. I end up Googling things or asking AI instead of figuring them out myself.

And honestly, with AI being so accessible nowadays, I feel like it's becoming even harder to push myself to actually learn and practice these things properly instead of just getting an instant answer.

It's frustrating because I genuinely want to become a better Linux sysadmin and feel confident working in the terminal without constantly relying on external help.

So my question is: How did you guys get comfortable with the command line?

Did you follow any specific practice routines? Build small projects? Force yourselves to avoid Google/AI? Are there any exercises, resources, or tips that helped you get better at combining commands and thinking in terms of the Linux CLI?

I'd really appreciate any advice, especially from experienced sysadmins who've been through something similar.

Thanks in advance!

I wanted to try Linux, so I did the research – watched tutorials, wrote down distro names, the software they had, and what they looked like, even if I didn’t install them. Let’s be honest, most of those videos are done in a virtual machine anyway! So if you’re thinking of switching from Windows, do it slowly – it took me years. I started back in 2019, and now I have one PC fully on Linux Mint. I’ll run that for about 6 months or so before taking the leap on my laptop as well. Here are the steps I took:

* I made sure I had a solid backup plan before I did anything else, so there was no risk to my files.
* I researched how to make a live USB. Rufus and Balena Etcher are both good, but if you don’t know which distro you want yet, they can be a little frustrating because you can’t have multiple distros on one stick. That’s why I went for Ventoy. Yes, it can be a bit fiddly to set up – especially if you’ve never done it before, because I hadn’t either!
* I downloaded several distros and put them on the USB stick with Ventoy: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and Tuxedo OS. Why so many? Because they come with different desktop environments – that’s what the OS will actually look like and feel like to use.
* I rebooted my PC once I knew all my files were safe – just in case I clicked something by mistake and accidentally wiped Windows. I booted from the USB stick via the boot menu in BIOS. Every PC is different, so you’ll need to check how to access yours – in my case it was just holding/tapping the Delete key, moving my USB stick to the top of the boot order, then choosing which distro to try.
* In the live environment, I went through the software managers checking for my programs – like my office suite. If I couldn’t find something, I’d reboot back to Windows with my notes: ticked what was available, crossed what wasn’t.
* I carried on using Windows, but found alternative software that works on BOTH Windows and Linux – so I could get used to it *before* switching OS. I kept booting into the live USB to test things out, but never installed anything – just getting a feel for what suited me.
* Eventually I chose Linux Mint. I dual‑booted using a separate hard drive. Since I hadn’t done this before, I shut down and unplugged every other drive – so there was *no way* I could wipe Windows by accident! If you don’t have a spare drive, most distros will offer “Install alongside Windows” – that works too, this is just what felt safest to me.
* Once installed, I updated the system and set up system snapshots. Linux Mint has this built‑in, but on other distros you’d use Timeshift. This is my safety blanket – if I break something, I just restore back to an earlier date.
* Then just use it! Do your normal daily tasks and see if it fits. There’s no rush. Take your time. And remember – Windows is still there if you decide it’s not for you.

Something on my system periodically (randomly?) tries to access an empty USB floppy drive. I am concerned that I may have malware.

dmesg does not show any record of an access attempt or failure to read. Is there a log or some mechanism I can use to monitor and list any attempts to access this drive? The access attempts don't seem to be on any sort of set schedule, so I can't predict them.

Having the patch file how to make dpkg/apt apply it during installing specific package? I.e. as part of the command

dpkg -i not-patched-package.deb

Why did my root partition finally fill up (Fedora KDE)

A couple weeks ago I got a message that my computer couldn't update because I had run out of storage on my roof partition. The partition was 50Gb at the time if I remember right. Games and media are stored on other drives/partitions and so aren't part of this.

In response to this, I used the KDE partition manager to shrink and shift the neighboring partition so I could expand the root partition to 150Gb and not have to worry about it again.

It's been like a week now and other than running updates I haven't installed any new programs. The entire 150Gb is full. I don't know where the extra data is. I restarted my system. I checked Filelight and it can see only 36 Gb of data in the root folder, but it still shows up as a full 150Gb partition in Dolphin. I tried a DNF clean and it did nothing. I cleared out my trash and it's unclear if that even registered for freeing up storage.

WTF is happening and how do I fix it?

I am getting a ThinkPad T14 gen 4 with AMD CPU/iGPU. I will be using it daily for everything, a bit of work, watching vids and gaming. What distro should I choose? I was recommended mint but after a bit of research I found fedora. Maybe there is a better os then both of them for me? lmk please cuz I don’t know atp

Why does Fedora seem to modify so many components of its own ecosystem? I'm using Fedora Workstation and would like to understand why it uses Fedora's Flatpak repository instead of Flathub.

When testing Cinnamon, I also noticed changes to the theme and other visual elements, rather than keeping the desktop environment's default appearance. Even Firefox seems to have been customized.

What's the reason for these modifications? Why doesn't Fedora preserve the original configurations of the applications and desktop environments it provides?

I installed Ubuntu on an old HP EliteDesk 800 and just used it to host a Minecraft Bedrock server using AMP. But not even a day in, the server crashed, so I plugged the HP device back into the monitor to see what was up, and there was no video output. I had to restart the device to get video output, and that corrupted the world, losing progress and even backups. This is seriously pissing me off because I had an issue a while back that made me go back to Windows, and this is making me want to leave again.

I have several raspberry Pi’s performing specific services, and a couple of mint Linux laptops, but my daily driver and user devices are Max and iPads.

My HP printer connected to my Mac has been ridiculously unreliable, to the point where the Mac often fails to recognize it.

I’m wondering if I could hang the HP printer off of a raspberry Pi, and use that to serve the printer for the home network. I am hoping that this will be a more reliable way to share a printer on the home network for both the Apple and Linux devices.

Anybody got experience with this?

Why are certain items on Debian 13 not showing change logs for specific items in Synaptic?

https://ibb.co/LzZPgG4G

Lately I've been thinking about how much of my everyday computer use depends on having an account somewhere. Notes, files, photos, bookmarks, even little things I used to just keep on my own computer.

I'd like to get back to having more stuff stored locally, but every time I look into alternatives, I end up down a rabbit hole of self-hosting guides, syncing tools, and services that need their own maintenance.

I don't want to spend more time managing my setup than actually using it. I just like the idea of my files still being there even if a service changes its pricing or shuts down.

For those who've gone down this road, what did you move locally first that was genuinely worth it?

because I see Ubuntu is the best if you exclude snap and Ubuntu pro and telemetry

is there any Ubuntu have uninstalled snap and Ubuntu Pro and telemetry

and I want it perfect UI because mint have bad UI experience for me

So I have VENTOY USB stick with maybe 15 linux distros that I explore on my other PC which is T510.

Today I installed FEDORA Workstation and it shows Fedora logo and then it just shuts down whole pc? I tried Troubleshoot mode etc but everytime same result but for example KDE Plasma version works normal.

I have never experienced problem like this so what could cause this?

So does my laptop just hate Gnome or what? :D

I have mint and my mic has some bad background sounds. I can onlu solve it bu decreasing my mic levels. I am not sure if my sound is lower. Also my friend said that he has a similar problem. Btw I have Lenovo Thinkpad

Starting with Linux can be exciting, but it can also feel overwhelming when troubleshooting laptop issues, choosing a distribution, or setting up a new PC build.

For experienced Linux users, what do you wish you'd known when you first started? Share your best tips, favorite distros, and lessons learned to help newcomers get started with confidence!

i have cachyos+niri+limine setup
i want to open the noctalia setup wizard as i accidently closed it on my first session(mostly just for just in case and a full experiance) since i closed it .setup-complete wasn’t made but no matter what i do i cannot seem to open the wizard again
also can someone confirm if there should be any inbuilt wallpaper and themes
was rlly hoping for the emerald one cachyos docs showed

I've been having a problem with controlling the volume on my computer when connected to Bluetooth devices, no matter how much I mess with the volume, the actual volume coming out of the Bluetooth device stays the same, this can usually be solved if it's a headphone, because you can just mess with the buttons on the headphone for volume control, but in the case of something like earpods, it just becomes straight up impossible, because obviously there's no buttons on earpods or really any way of controlling the volume other than via the device's controls

Hello, my laptop is MSI katana 17, I have NVIDIA, endeveourOS, kde plasma

There was serious problem with screen where after opening laptop, this don't worked but there was noise in laptop, keyboard light, charging devices do worked, screen to TV don't worked or showed grey dark screen, repair said there was problem with screen, fixed. This could happen because I often closed screen in laptop which can happen for reason

I saw a lot peoples say that MSI laptop is very bad for linux and they don't have full potential in GPU. I suspect of overheating or unusually high heating, in game which use high graphics like cs 2 usually have 50-70 temperature. And in celestia shell in niri, I noticed usually temperature might go 50-80 which is fucked up and I saw heating in laptop, in just niri this probably don't happen

Battery was the only big serious problem in linux distros, battery in pirated windows 11 was usually 11-16 hours, in ubuntu 3 hours, in endevourOS there can be kinda more and maybe update fixed this, but usually 3-6?, this is still few

I want apps, packages, to check if everything is ok in laptop, if nothing is wrong, screen test, like with antutu benchmark in android, also you can write how I can improve PC in endeveourOS

Hey everyone!

I know a lot of people have strong opinions on "learing" to use linux with AI.

I had really great experiences with that so far. I tried switching to Linux before like 2022 or so but it was to much of a hustle for my non tech background back then so i decieded to move back to win for the time being. But after win 10 EOL and the complete pile of dirt that win 11 is i finally started by reviving my old 2017 Laptop and it is insane how well it runs on pop os.

Long stroy short: without ai it would have taken so much more of my rare free time that i probalby would have quit along the way. Also i try to learn as much as i can by not just asking chat gpt: ey setup my laptop. But use a project in claude with all the documentations of popos as rescource and prompting focused on learing and activly explainng me concepts, and using formus as another reaserach step before awnsering.

I think that works quite decent and i succesfully revived my old surface with fedore and project linux-surface.

But now I would like to stop using ai as a cruch so much and actually start to do more things on my own. How would I do this in 2026? How do you non AI users do that? Do i just reed though the documentations like a book and memorize the termianl commands or maybe yt? But without a specific problem to solve that seems pointless no? I would like to get more into coding and tech in general so I'm not afraid of that stuff, I'm just a complete noob lol