Linux

Think about it this way: going onto Linux communities and listening to what people say can be like listening to car mechanics chat.

But do you need to know what all of that stuff means to drive your car? Nah. But that info could come in handy, if you wanted to modify your car or something like that.

You don't need to know what Wayland/X11, PipeWire, GTK4/Qt6, or anything like that is, in much the same way you don't need to know what PowerShell, Event Viewer, NT kernel, or registry are to use Windows.

Welcome to the Linux community. :)

You will probably never understand everything about Linux and all of its included and associated systems. That's completely fine, no one does! That's why we are many, and it's what asking for advice or help is for. You can just learn whatever interests you at your own pace, and know that there will always be interesting things you haven't seen yet.

You probably think of yourself as pretty knowledgeable regarding Windows, but have you ever studied for a Microsoft certification exam? This in depth knowledge is not something the average user needs for his daily usage, but can be interesting to read/know.

Don't sweat it. There were people doing advanced things in Windows that would probably have blown your mind as well. It's just that most people that use Linux just enjoy tinkering for the sake of tinkering so it's more visible, and Linux lends itself to people doing weird and wonderful things never envisioned by it's creators.

You just started on the road, where you stop is entirely up to you. Just know that the view is way more interesting going this route. Take a few pictures on the way.

• repeat the “Don’t sweat it.”
• Ubuntu is a perfectly fine starting point (the other “beginner distro” that’s commonly recommended is LinuxMint)
• »AFTER« you become comfortable with what you have:
  • try familiarizing yourself with the command line
    • far more competent than Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell
    • !linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev
  • get overwhelmed with all the distro choices available
    • get bitten by the distro-hopping bug (“Gotta try them all!”)
      • and then try Distrobox (“ALL the distros at once!”)
• »THEN« take a look at immutable distros
  • “immutable distro” is a catch-all term that embraces several concepts
    • immutable – the root filesystem is set to read-only – makes it harder to mess up your system
    • declarative – your hardware and packages and configs are declared in a master configuration file
    • atomic / transactional – updates are checked as they’re applied, if it fails, it gets rolled back to a previous “safe state”
    • container / sandbox – ex. Flatpak or Docker or OCI – apps are isolated in their own sandbox and not allowed to mess up anything else

It's fine you don't have to understand any of these just use the computer normally and you're good