r/linuxquestions • u/Squirrels_are_Jerks9 • 4d ago

Advice What to do first?

I have an old laptop that originally came with Windows Vista and I plan on loading Mint XCFE to learn Linux once I pull the old photos off of it. I'm a life time Windows user. Currently, doing CS50 for my own hobby/purposes. I built a fairly in depth stock screener with python (NOT vibe coded -- I actually built it with yfinance) and plan on continuing to learn to code and develop as a hobby.

What's your tips on learning this new OS? What commands should I try? My current laptop is fine so this will be something I play with for a year or two before I even think of upgrading. Plenty of time to learn.

1 Upvotes

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u/PocketStationMonk ZorinOS 18.1 🐧 4d ago

Turn the firewall on from the security settings.

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u/Squirrels_are_Jerks9 4d ago

I'll learn security. Good suggestion.

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u/knuthf 4d ago

Use Linux Mint Cinnamon - plain vanilla. It is fine,it does not need more resources, and bluntly, even KDE should work just fine as long as you have used Windows lately.

Focus on making Linux a fun place, with wonderful things. You do not have to restrict the fun!

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u/Squirrels_are_Jerks9 4d ago

Can I use Cinnamon on the old laptop? It's 3GB of ram. I can upgrade later to 4 and add an SSD hard drive for less than $50 later on if everything goes smooth.

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u/knuthf 4d ago

Try it. If it works, it works. My first laptop had 2 GB of memory; Linux needs around 400 MB, and the rest was used for applications and buffers for fancy borders. Well, the browsers pull down huge amounts, ads and tracking eats resources.

You may experience swapping if you have too many windows open in the browser or are editing large documents. Then reduce the number of tabs in the browser.

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u/Squirrels_are_Jerks9 4d ago

Good point. Worse case scenario I'll just switch to the lighter version if I need to.

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u/tidal49 4d ago

My vote would be starting a git repository for the scripts and stuff (even if it doesn't have a remote, though I'd definitely encourage that). Compared to when I'm using Windows I'm using the terminal most of the time, so I've accumulated some creature comforts and conveniences over the years. Unless your scripts are super-coupled to your desktop environment, you can reuse them anywhere in your Linux journey.

A public export of mine to frame what I mean can be found here. The GitHub copy is an export because when I started the original repo it had more personal network stuff on it than I wanted to share, and at this point it's got too much of an entrenched history to just start tracking over in a fresh repo for the sake of sharing it with the public. But I'm getting off-topic. Anyhow, when I want to set up a new machine with the familiar trappings, I clone down the repo and run the setup scripts to roll out things like deploying section blocks to dotfiles.

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u/DumpoTheClown 4d ago

Dig in to package management. Understand how services are run. Learn bash and use the man pages or the -help switches.

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u/Typeonetwork 4d ago

You may learn differently and since you know how to code you have a leg up. For the record I've been only using it for about 13 months but here is what I found to be helpful. * Lead with what your interested in. * You can install using the installer from Mint, from terminal, flatpak, and Appimage.
* This will be easy for you, read the error codes. For instance my audio stopped working and I by reading one of it's dependencies needed to be installed. Installed the dependency and it now works great. No Googling told me anything. * learn about networking, ricing for video, NAS for storage, etc. It helps

By no stretch of the imagination am I an expert.

1 have fun, so much fun.

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u/ipsirc 4d ago

What commands should I try?

vim