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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

    First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

    Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

    And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.


  • Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

    I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

    I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

    And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

    I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

    And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

    Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

    And then a big gap

    And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

    And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

    And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

    And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

    Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

    And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

    Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

    Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.


  • It’s really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they’re using, etc.

    I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.

    Other kids may benefit from it if they’re not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.

    In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age

    And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.