My Journey of Becoming a Linux Power User

While describing the blog series to a friend I accidentally slipped up and said “I want to write about how I’m trying to be a better Unix Loser” instead of Linux User. I think the name is going to stick around, since it’s kind of funny and I like my BSD friends.

So here’s the goal of this blog Series: Become a completely native Linux User with a full knowledge of the bash commands necessary to administer a complete compute cluster, web server, and file storage/database. There are other tools I’m going to be learning as well, since I can’t do everything inside of bash. I’m already using Nextcloud to keep track of my own data and my Family’s (more on that in another post, since that’s a fascinating topic in and of itself) which is based off apache, PHP, MySQL, and Redis. I don’t really know how to use those things. I’m almost totally reliant on the community forums, stack overflow, and github comments. It would be nice not to need to google something every time I need to make a change.

I’m also using Blender (The software a lot of my workflows and motivation surround), and Blender has it’s own Linux Command line language/interface for headless rendering and operation I want to take advantage of, and maybe even figure out some Kubernetes or Ansible deployment options (this will have to be explored further).

In terms of Terminal Emulators, I really enjoy Terminology. It’s a lesser known terminal part of a somewhat obscure desktop environment called Enlightenment. I was turned onto Enlightenment at Linux Fest Northwest this year by it’s Debian package maintainer, and while I don’t think I’ll install the full desktop environment, I really enjoy their super solid multitasking terminal emulator. It works great on all of my devices, and the tycat command is awesome. Now you can actually print out image files in the terminal: something I actually was missing from my graphical file browsers. It also has a great window paning system similar to what I’m used to in Blender that functions somewhat similar to a tiling window manager. It fits great into my workflow, and the more eyes that are on it the better it becomes.

The last thing is that I want to have sufficient programming skills to contribute to the open source projects that I love so much. I’m already learning python and getting to the point that I can start building extensions to Blender and build little quality of life programs (I calculate my budget with Python, and soon it will have SQLite integration. I also plan to build a fitness tracker and analysis program for another little device).

So with those goals in mind, let me share some of my story about where I’ve been with Linux in the past. Despite being a Linux user for the last ten years, most of that time I only knew a few commands:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade
    sudo apt-get purge
    sudo apt-get install

Beyond those few commands, opening a terminal window was just a terrifying experience. I understood a lot of how powerful it was, and how it was an alternative for the desktop environment I was using. But it didn’t really seem worth it, especially since all through high school I basically only used my computer for Blender and Google Drive. I am proud however of how many times I was able to follow the guides for getting proprietary Nvidia drivers working way back in the days of Ubuntu 11.04 and previous.

Things are a lot better now. A lot of my file manipulations and hunting happens in the terminal with just regular bash commands. I don’t even have a terminal file browser installed on my workstation or laptop. It might be nice to get one, I don’t know yet. I haven’t delved in that far yet. I nano config files, and actually understand how those changes affect what happens for the most part. SSH I feel fairly confident about, although I know that I’ve only scratched the surface.

APT is another big one that I’m glad I’ve chosen to dive into. With fixing broken packages, PPA’s, adding experimental repos and the like, I know that here is where I’ll typically go beyond the casual Ubuntu user’s experience. But there is still so much for me to learn, especially since I know that I want to create my own packages and software.

From my local bookstore I’ve purchased “The Complete to the Linux Command Line” and since BASH commands haven’t really changed at all in the last billion years (at least not really), this is probably a good place to start.

Whether it’s going to be useful or not remains to be seen, but I have a second edition copy of “The Linux Bible” from the early 90‘s. I mostly got it as a piece of history, since it was produced by the now defunct Linux company Yggdrasil. But this was back in the days of manually setting up an X window system and before a lot of the modern convenience we have with our modern distributions. If it proves not useful, I think I’ll pick up a copy of Linux From Scratch, or do a Gentoo installation at some point. When I’m ready for it. This is not that time.

Last but not least is the book I’m almost finished with that’s proved incredibly useful for my basic understanding of computer science and programming: “Learn Python the Hard Way.” While I’ve heard from friends that it’s not as updated for Python 3 convention as it should be, it’s been an enjoyable experience so far.

So now that you have an idea of where I’m starting and where I want to go, I invite you on my journey to become a complete master with me.