Free Unix alternative even alongside current Windows or even as a replacement (Windows 10 seems to be the last one for me). The first Linux distribution, aka 'Distro' I got to know was Ubuntu 5.10, whose installation disks I got from a friend. This is a very popular distribution based on Debian. Due to my young age and lack of knowledge and skills I didn't dive into the Linux world after the trial.. and especially the lack of games on the Linux platform compared to Windows was.. a big deficiency. This has been confirmed in history that developers didn't want to compile games for Linux due to many changing factors and even OS changes so you'd have to constantly be fixing things.
Ubuntu 12.04 was a clear advance with its UI redesign. Although there were some minor issues like with PulseAudio but it was fixed in version 12.10. Over time though the package distribution (library) shenanigans became unpleasantly familiar - package A required packages B, C, D and E, of which package E, obviously the last one, was outdated and had been removed from the general distribution or worst case some package wanted to remove a large batch of packages due to compatibility conflicts breaking the UI (famously LTT's Linus also noticed this when he didn't know what he was doing with Steam's installation).
I switched to trying the hyped big boy Arch Linux but I don't recommend it since Arch is a minimalist distribution version meaning you must configure the installer yourself (e.g. Grub) and desktop environment (e.g. GNOME). wiki.archlinux.org - Beginners Guide gets you far. As a Finnish person remember the command loadkeys fi. But eventually I got bored so Linux remained out of use (the package manager pacman Syu also once broke the whole OS - thanks).
I was introduced to a different kind of Unix world years later when I used a slightly modified 2011 Macbook Pro laptop for a year and a half but I was quickly disappointed with the FreeBSD-based macOS operating system. Apple's own "infrastructure" for end users is very good (it was at least). But beneath all the shine Apple used a criminally old version of OpenGL and on the OpenSource path you end up using Homebrew which went against norms meaning as soon as Apple stops supporting the device Homebrew also stopped supporting it with a warning message to get a newer device. There's too much of this distorted thinking in the world where you need the latest and greatest. Also annoyingly even through Homebrew you ended up using outdated software.
Years later I wanted to give Linux another chance and accidentally found T2 SDE on YouTube. This is a continuation of ROCK Linux (Claire Wolf) and has been maintained by René Rebe and many other developers since 2004. Like Gentoo, OpenSUSE and Arch this too is based on source code and especially minimal extra code (package management, installation etc.). One very big feature is the SDE part meaning what you can use to build packages from source code and create a whole custom Distro for the most diverse selection of architectures (SPARC, ARM, PowerPC etc.). Especially for myself for the Playstation 3 for which I still create *.iso installations. Thanks to T2 Linux after about three years of use I've finally switched to mostly Linux from Windows. Finally Linux to my taste which tastes like what Linux has been talked about for decades it should be, supports the hardware I have and no nonsense about support ending. Also the installation program/script (STONE) is the fastest I've used when installing Linux.
Also the "package manager" aka "T2 SDE" is in my opinion the friendliest of all (yes, even Arch Linux) since it's based on compiling source code and unlike Debian style using pre-compiled and linked (statically, yuck!) *.deb installation packages or using apt-get install where you can't fix things yourself without a complicated operation because you might have to pull up tens of packages again so the linking works and packages are built to work together.. so you can only wait hoping the original developers fix the problem or get corrected packages from unofficial sources. You may also have to update the whole Linux release because the fix was only compiled to work with the latest kernel. Points to T2 for not breaking packages into separate *-dev sub-packages like Debian. No problems arise when you compile the program just for you - you don't need to put the whole system at risk. Appimage? These work better but sometimes contain still stupid static linking hoping you have a certain library installed at a certain version from a certain location, which might break the program's use if that's not the case. As one thing that might surprise you.. VLC's code is at a very abandonware level so I strongly recommend switching to using mpv which is a very nice simple video/music player. I apologize. VLC is and should be left to history as a nice memory.
Terminals/Command Console/Shell commands. Ctrl + Shift + v;
mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/cdrom - Mount the cdrom.iso disk image to the /mnt/cdrom directory.
umount /mnt/cdrom - Unmount the cdrom.iso disk image from the /mnt/cdrom directory.
hwclock --systohc
chmod +x x - Grant execution permissions to the file (e.g. *.sh or *.run).
Temperature
lm-sensors -For monitoring temperatures. Source
sensors-detect -Detecting sensors.
sensors -Latest reading.
watch sensors -Updating reading.
Hard drives
cat /proc/partitions -Lists all partitions.
fdisk -l -Identifies hard drives and partitions on them.
lsblk -f -Identifies hard drives and partitions on them.
lsblk -Lists e.g. hard drives.
Automatic mounting (mount) of a drive (e.g. ntfs) at boot note! Verify the directory path!
mkdir /run/media/user/directory - Creates a directory for the drive.
lsblk -f - Lists hard drives (e.g. sdi) and partitions (e.g. sdi1).
vi /etc/fstab - Opens the fstab configuration file with a text editor (gnu vim).
/dev/sdi1 /run/media/user/directory ntfs-3g users,rw 0 0 - Add this text to the file. Exit the editor by pressing Esc then :x .
The drive will now appear in file management.
NTFS drive mounting. Alternative method to prevent moving files that contain characters unacceptable to Windows.
mkdir /media/user/directory - Creates a directory for the drive.
fdisk -l | grep NTFS - Shows NTFS drives.
mount -t ntfs-3g -o auto,users,nls=utf8,windows_names,umask=0 /dev/sdc1 /media/user/directory - Mounting the drive.
umount /media/user/directory - Unmounting the drive.
Mounting a Windows-created (software) RAID0 drive.
fdisk -l - Lists hard drives and partitions. In the example there are two identical hard drives.
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes .... Disk label: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 63 488395119 244197528+ 42 SFS Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes ... Disk label: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 63 488395119 244197528+ 42 SFS Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes ... Disk label: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 2048 976769023 488383488 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT ...
mdadm --build /dev/md0 --chunk=64 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda1 - Building the drive (build). The drive appears as device md0.
mdadm --stop /dev/md0 - You can stop the device if you need to fix or try to recreate with --build command.
(Maybe you'll need to continue...)
mkdir /media/directory - Creates a directory where md0 will be mounted.
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/md0 /media/directory - Mounting the md0 drive.
umount /media/directory - Unmounting the drive.
Program compilation
make -jx x = number of cores + 1.
make check -Check before possible mess.
make installcheck -Installation check before possible mess (not always available).
make distclean -Cleaning up the mess.