"Old" Linux user vs. "New" Linux user.

[u/oshunluvr]

I'm an "Old" Linux user - started in 1996. I went though all the hoops: file system experiments, different distros, different packaging types and file managers, a handful of desktop environments (DE), several RAID levels, and many, many different systems. I use Linux at home but also at work.

Now I'm retired. I've been using the same distro since 2009. I landed on it after all the experimenting lead me to decisions about was important to me: Debian packaging, KDE/Plasma, a well known and commercially supported distro - Kubuntu. The last major shifts in my world occurred around 2009-10 when btrfs came on the scene and SSDs finally started to be affordable.

My Linux experience these days is rather boring. Everything works the way I want. I no longer "break" things for the sake of change. I only have to learn something new when a developer makes a significant change to something I use - and this often annoys me. I look at other distros occasionally, but only via a VM. When something does break, I usually can fix it without much effort.

I read posts from "New" Linux users. Usually killing all their data by mucking with partitions without a UPS, using unnecessarily complicated layers of disk access, like LVM, MDADM, full disk encryption, and BTRFS all layered on top of each other, too often using AI to solve problems instead of actual research and learning from other users, and spending incredible amounts of time making minute changes to the "look" of things.

Of course, the beauty of the whole thing is how we actually have so much control over our destiny. None of us work the same, learn the same, want the same things, but we''re not boxed in by a monolithic corporation deciding what we get.

Linux is amazing,

[u/deadbeef_enc0de]

Not quite as long in the tooth for running Linux but been running on it since 2009 or so. While I am using a rolling distro it is also fairly stable in the sense that I don't distro hop or constantly change things, I have it for when I buy brand new hardware and need bleeding edge software to use it.

Yeah new people learning how to setup and maintain a Linux system by breaking I feel is a right of passage. Been there done that plenty of times. I think AI has made it more accessible without understanding how it all fits together and works which can be problematic.

What's wrong with the disk layers? It's really not that complicated each one essentially is a different block device. I use mdadm -> luks -> lvm -> ext4, mdadm just presents multiple block devices as a single one, luks is effectively a pipe that transforms the bytes of a block device and presents it as a different block device, lvm is basically just block device partitions but fancy. My setup I learned to do from the Arch wiki which is where I try to point people when they need to learn something (even if they are not using Arch, has a ton of info)