(*wags tail at both PJ and Sam!!* =^.^=)

yeah! Terminal’s super useful but also kind of daunting.

If y’all haven’t seen the man pages, they make an excellent reference. Honestly, they’re basically written more as reference than as tutorial type stuff most of the time. So that’s there whenever your cheatsheet doesn’t cover something.

Also we use zsh (without plugins, you don’t need plugins) and it’s got really fancy autocomplete. We can just type - and hit tab and get a list of all the options for that command (that zsh knows about; I don’t think it goes and reads man pages for you or anything like that). I can’t remember how you turn that on but I think it’s something you can do from zsh’s initial setup wizard. I don’t know if bash can do the same thing or not, I think probably not (but we’re not super up to date on bash).

(I’d avoid fish, which you might also run into if you go looking for fancy features. It’s known for really fancy features but it’s also not compatible with normal shell scripts, which’ll screw you up if you ever want to get into scripting. zsh does normal shell script syntax (with the exception of protecting you if you forget to quote your variables) and also has really nice fancy features like the autocomplete.)

– Frost

Yeahhhh

We use Debian and ripped out systemd (replaced it with openrc) a bit before all this happened. Feeling really good about that choice now.

(unrelated: plural gang! :3)

– Frost

Finally, we’re not just the Crazy Weirdos anymore!

It’d be awesome to get alternate init systems on, say, Debian hammered out into a more user-friendly shape. It’s already fairly decent but feels a tad precarious and the initial setup is way too involved. (We’re running OpenRC personally.)

– Frost

Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!

There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.

Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.

– Frost

Psst, you can keep your /home. Copy /home/username to a new partition before the install (just the username folder in the root of the new partition), do the install, and point it at your new partition as /home. Bam, it’s your new home.

Or you could copy out/copy back.

You’ll need to reinstall your apps, but you won’t need to redo all your settings for them.

– Frost