[-] itsoctober@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago

Hey, I am also recently learning to use Linux. I am definitely not a tech person at all. I went with Mint, as it's one of the typical generic recommendations for beginners. So far the learning process has been manageable. I can see that in the long term, I will probably eventually switch to something other than Mint, but I would say it was a good choice for me to learn on and in the short term I am going to keep learning on it as I've gotten it to satisfyingly do all of the basic stuff I needed. When I change to something else it will be because I want to go beyond that and start doing things in new (to me) ways.

I ended up asking a lot of questions to chat bots which actually helped me out a lot. I found that when I tried to search up issues or questions I was having (which was already hard, because I often didn't really even know what I am trying to ask or what words to use to ask it), a lot of the time I would find someone posting about the same issue, but a lot of the replies were just people telling them to just google it or calling OP lazy for asking. There's definitely many patient and helpful people too (like many of the people replying in this thread), but initially I still struggled a lot with comprehension of their help because I was so unfamiliar with even very basic computing terms. A lot of the material I find that is intended for beginners would be a bit demoralizing because, for my (quite) low level of tech knowledge, it felt a bit like this:

xkcd comic titled Average Familiarity, saying "Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate average person's familiarity with their field"

This is where chat bots were pretty helpful for making things more comprehensible. In addition to asking chat bots my basic questions, I also did a short command line tutorial (in my case, this one: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/command-line-for-beginners) and I started watching a YouTube channel called Veronica Explains. I can see I have a lot of stuff I still need to learn but I feel I am past the first hurdles now. It was difficult and kind of intimidating and frustrating at first and I still run into frustrations but now I am more and more excited about what I'll eventually be able to do as I learn more.

[-] itsoctober@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The place I use lately has a bookshelf and a machine that serves free coffee. Pretty comfy in there tbh

[-] itsoctober@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago

neoliberalism and "liberal internationalism", also known as austerity, IMF debt, coups d'etat, getting bombed by NATO and signing Status of Forces Agreements

itsoctober

joined 2 weeks ago