How hard is it to learn linux?

PHATSPEED7x

PHATSPEED7x

New Member
Is linux hard to learn? I've been looking at getting a computer from a friend, and she has linux installed as the main OS. I've only used windows on all my computers. My sister recently got a mac book, and she's learned mac OS pretty quick. Any tips, tricks?
 
Just like anything it all depends on how much effort you put into it. If you go through online newbie courses or a book for beginners and read through all the tutorials and teach yourself. I would guess that given a month of doing that, keeping up with a few sessions per a week and a few hours per a session you could learn pretty much all the basics.

http://linux-newbie.dotsrc.org/
 
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Depends on what Linux platform your using. Ubuntu and Kubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo are very easy to get into, but require some knowledge (especially if your porting games.) Another distro that aren't free but are fairly easy are RedHat.

Really just try it out, the 3 free ones i mentioned are easily downloaded (i got >1mb/s speeds using uTorrent) and burnt to a disc to use as a LiveCD (full access to OS w/o installation.)
 
It depends what distro it is and what you considor learning it... if you're using Ubuntu you can get away without knowing too much about the terminal, but a lot of other distros depend greatly upon your knowledge of the terminal. It takes some getting used to, but it's possible and (in Ubuntu at least) fairly easy. :)
 
Hard is relative to how apt(-get) (yay! linux joke!) you are to learning a new style of software and how open you are to troubleshooting issues that pop up (and they will).

If you've never used Linux before, personally, I'd stay away from Gentoo. Ubuntu (all flavors), however, is *excellent* starting point. It provides the ease of a very nice GUI for beginners and has the full-power of Unix once you get the hang of it and want to play god as Root. Plus, it has an enormous online Forum that always welcomes newcomers. Probably the best bang for the buck as far as Linux-newbies go:)
 
Gentoo, is a kind of, roll your own and smoke it Linux distro. You start building the OS from the command line and go from there. If you really know what you are doing though you can make a really good solid OS.

I personally have never had the patience or the time to sit down and build my own from scratch. Although I have compiled many of my own binaries.
 
I've learned alot. I'm currently changing a friends laptop over to ubuntu because her windows xp was all messed up.

I've downloaded it, and burned it on to a disc. I go to try and install it, and the computer doesn't want to boot from the disc I made. How do I get this thing to work????
 
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You need to burn the downloaded file as a .iso image. No time for details right now, but I covered it in a previous Post. If you do an advanced search for Posts containing ".iso" made by me, it should lead you to it. If not, there are a few other Linux folks around, so someone should be able to pop in.
 
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