Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓

I mean, it’s intended to be an insult because the implication is that Reddit sucks.

I personally never understood the “Redditor” insults.

Reddit is just a forum directory with an infinite feed. You can find cringey weirdos but there’s also subreddits for potted plants, chess, home improvement, etc. which are pretty mundane and low drama.

I left Reddit for similar reasons, but I still use it sometimes for troubleshooting and advice in the IT/Programming space.

Start with Linux Mint. It’s similar in vibe to older Windows, (think Windows 7/10)

You can use the GUI for everything, even major version upgrades, driver installations, and Kernel changes.

It comes with everything you need to get started, and their software portal is easy to use and get stuff from, including gaming staples like Steam, OBS Studio, etc.

Netbird and Pangolin too.

Free Options:

• Go to your local library, borrow DVDs, Music CDs, and Audio books. Take them home a use one of the many free software options to rip the content onto your own computer.
• Stream recording. You can find all kinds of free streaming sites to watch movies and TV shows. You can use the ytdl command line tool to rip those movies and shows to your own computer, and I don’t think that will trigger your ISPs alarm bells, I might be wrong though. If that is too advanced or isn’t working, just go full goblin mode and start playing the media full screen, then use OBS or another free screen cap software to record your screen. Set it and forget it.
• Torrent raw and risk it from your own home. Depending on your country, this might not actually be a big deal.

Cheap Options:

• Mullvad is $6 per month. You can almost certainly afford that. But if you truly can’t, then if you’re in the US (idk about other countries) donating plasma can net you $30-$40 on the low end and $60-$80 on the high end. And assuming you’re reasonably healthy, you can donate once a week. Even just one session at the low end would net you 4-5 months of VPN access.
• Sell stuff on Ebay, Craigslist, etc. You probably have some old junk laying around. Old computer parts, clothes, random tools, etc. All you need to do is find something worth 6$ and bam, there’s a month of VPN.
• If you live in an area with multiple ISPs and you pay for your own internet, call the other ones and tell them what you’re currently paying for internet, ask them if they can beat it by at least $10 a month. They will almost always say yes, and they will often include free installation and equipment set up too. You’re now saving at least $10 a month on your internet and can afford a monthly VPN plan.

Thanks for the response. I’m doing great now. Got a new job as a sysadmin making about 35% more than my old job, and I get to work on Linux a bunch, and my team is really solid.

Still sucks that I lost all that work, but I was able to get some of the old hardware back for free, so my old servers can live again in my home lab.

Lol this is somebody’s hackerman fantasy post, the chain smoking, the terminology, I can practically hear the early 2000’s drum n’ bass/nightcore in the background.

Sorry, typo, I fixed it now. Pseudo-VM is what I meant.

It’s alright now, does what it needs to do. It’s kind of a pain because of the weirdness of running as a pseudo-VM, but better than no Linux at all.

Sorry for your loss :( Same thing happened to me about a year ago.

I was the sole IT admin for a small company. Used Debian with KDE on a snappy little Thinkpad. No issues managing all the infra with it, even though most of it was MS trash. I used Reminnia for RDP into the Windows servers, and the Browser for all O365/Entra administration. A Windows 11 VM for the rare times I needed to test Windows-only apps or configs.

Worked like a dream, but then we got bought out by a huge competitor. Their IT team took everything over. I had to decommission my on-prem Linux servers, Ansible automations, Open Project tracking and FOSS ticketing system. Finally, I had to give up my Sweet little Linux Thinkpad and use their standard-issue HP Windows 11 garbage laptop. They were slow, clunky, buggy, and ugly, it was awful.

I quit a few months later after securing the job I have now. It pays about 35% more, has twice as much PTO, and about 50% of my workload is Linux stuff. It’s so much better.

My advice, if it’s truly non negotiable, install WSL first thing. It’s not nearly as good as having actual Linux, because it’s running inside of Microslop’s horrid OS, but it’s better than nothing. Try to be an advocate for FOSS at the company, see if you can convince leadership to let you implement Linux-based solutions wherever they might fit, make yourself the de facto expert on them so you at least get to work on Linux and FOSS infra.

Aside from that, start job hunting. Try to find a job that will let you be more Linuxy.

Linux Mint. Everything including full system version upgrades and GPU driver installations can be done via GUI.

The default look and feel is Windows-y, and the Mint team does a great job of pre-loading their distro with all the basic apps most people need, including a good printer app, scanner app, PDF viewer, media player, etc.

“Old men keep dreaming up battles for young men to fight.”

Daggers - The Chariot

President of peace, eh MAGAts?

Yeah, it’s a neat little tool. I used it recently at my work. We had a big list of endpoints that we needed to make sure were powered down each night for a week during a patching window.

A sysadmin on my team wrote a script that pinged all of the endpoints in the list and returned only the ones that still were getting a response, that way we could see how many were still powered on after a certain time. But he was just manually running the script every few minutes in his terminal.

I suggested using the watch command to execute the script, and then piping the output into the sort command so the endpoints were nicely alphabetical. Worked like a charm!

The watch command is very useful, for those who don’t know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not “real time” because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.

Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.

My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞

Finally got my crap together. Career taking off, got rid of my toxic relationships, adopted several cats, getting into really good shape.

I work in IT, many of the managers are pushing it. Nothing draconian, there are a few true believers, but the general vibe is like everybody is trying to push it because they feel like they’ll be judged if they don’t push it.

Two of my coworkers are true believers in the slop, one of them is constantly saying he’s been, “consulting with ChatGPT” like it’s an oracle or something. Ironically, he’s the least productive member of the team. It takes him days to do stuff that takes us a few hours.

That’s rough, I’m sorry too, it never gets easier. 💔 stay strong, the important thing is that they feel safe and loved 💙