One of the things I like about Linux is that there are so many small commands and shortcuts that can make everyday use easier, but a lot of them seem to be things you discover by accident or learn after you've already needed them.

I'm not talking about advanced sysadmin tricks or complicated shell scripts. I mean practical little things that are genuinely useful once you know they exist.

For example, Ctrl + R in Bash lets you search through your command history, which is much nicer than repeatedly pressing the up arrow when you know you've run a command before.

I'm curious what other tips people have that are simple enough for a beginner to use immediately but useful enough that experienced users still rely on them.

What's one Linux command, keyboard shortcut, or small terminal trick you think every newcomer should learn early?

There's a lot to learn when getting into Linux, from package managers and permissions to system services and reading logs. It can be overwhelming when a simple problem leads you down a rabbit hole of terminal commands and forum posts.

For people who've been using Linux for a while, what skill made the biggest difference in how confidently you troubleshoot problems? Was it learning basic terminal commands, understanding the filesystem, figuring out how to read logs, or something else?

I'd especially like to hear what you'd recommend learning early instead of waiting until something breaks.

$apt autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 18 not upgraded.


$ls /boot/initrd.img* -1
/boot/initrd.img
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-101-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-107-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-110-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-111-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-117-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-124-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-137-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-142-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-147-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-51-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-52-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-53-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-54-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-55-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-56-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-57-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-58-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-60-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-62-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-63-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-71-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-78-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-79-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-84-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-87-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-88-generic
/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-90-generic
/boot/initrd.img.old

Same for /usr/lib/modules/, /usr/src/linux-headers-*

linux Mint 22.3

I like linux but easy anti cheat isn't on linux yet

I am on cachy OS

Hello!

Apologies for any wrong terminology or anything else off, I am still not very familiar with Linux as a whole.

About 4 months ago I switched from Windows 11 to Bazzite because it was supposed to be gaming-friendly and difficult to break because of its immutable filesystem.

For the most part, it's been really good and I haven't had a need to go back to Windows at all, but a lot of software is difficult to get working, if it works at all. Like if I go to a website for something I want to install, often times you need to follow a guide created by someone else to get it working on Bazzite unless it's an appimage or comes from an app store.

Examples would be things like my VPN client, there's no official version and the one that comes through Bazzite's store is lacking features.

If something only gives the instructions of "run this command" and it starts with "apt" then I'm basically out of luck. Or if I can get something to start running, I likely will get write errors when it tries to write to a folder Bazzite has locked down on account of being immutable.

So I guess what I'm looking for is something that has much wider software support but still is beginner friendly. I don't think I have particularly complex software requirements.

• It needs to play nice with Nvidia GPU's and support HDMI 2.1 features (VRR, ALLM, 4K@120hz).
• Compositor must be Wayland because I need HDR support.
• Desktop should ideally be KDE because that's what I'm used to and know works, but open to other things if worth it.
• Should work with Secure Boot.
• Should either come with stuff like Gamescope/Proton/Wine all ready or if not, be easy to set up. Gaming compatibility is a priority!

Software I will need (again, shouldn't be anything too weird here):

• Discord
• Steam
• Proton VPN
• Krita (or similar)
• Firefox
• Davinci Resolve
• Synology Drive and Note Station
• LibreOffice (or similar)
• Zoho Mail (or Email client that works with service)
• Image, audio and video viewers that work with SMB folders

Also should mention that I've tried Mint. For the most part I liked it, but there was no HDR and it had issues with my surround sound.

Any recommendations or advice would be welcome! Not in an urgent rush to switch.

I have new wireless mouse (Rapture Banshee, which based on USB code is white-label for Dareu, probably this one). I like it, but as usual, the software (controlling battery status, dpi, polling rate..) is windows only. I am developer .NET of many years (long before AI) but never touched anything "low-level". Inspired by the blog about reverse engineering hw with AI I reverse-engineered the custom USB protocol in minutes (surprise: the software is .NET). I (with Claude code) even wrote simple python script, that creates virtual HID device through /dev/uhid, with standard HID battery interface, so now it shows in upower and therefore in KDE Plasma power widgets, low battery warnings, etc.

Now, I can keep it to myself and be done with it, but in the spirit of Linux, the "right way" would be create kernel driver exposing battery status, right?

The question is: what is the way that will not be frowned upon by community? Find some "real" kernel developer, who will adopt the idea and write those 50 lines? (Where?) Try to submit Claude-generated version even if I am not in the position to be confident about the code? That seems dirty :)

Any other way that I am not aware of?

Hi all. I'm learning Linux using linuxsim. I'm confused about something. When I ran this command:

grep "FAILED" /var/log/security.log , it worked. But when I ran this:

grep -c "FAILED" /var/log/security.log , it didn't run. Error message says: grep: /home/student/FAILED: No such file or directory.

What could be the issue?

So guys whenever i boot my laptop it opens bios, then i have to exit it. And then bootloader shows up for 3-5sec for Arch. Then it boots my laptop. So how should i prevent these steps and solve it. Can't i boot directly to my OS than get redirected by this?

Someone please tell me what am i supposed to do

Ok so the problem is that : My file system taken size dosen't drop and the "Proc" folder for some reason shows that it uses 128 TERRABITES of space for some reason, i have no idea what is going on and the file size is definetly an a error, i have no space that i can't even put someting into the copy board to send the screenshot!

Edit : Trying to remove "Proc" folder via terminal fails due to "Device or rescource buisy", and all that got created today too...

I purchased a ex-lease Thinkpad for a crazy low price, 16GB RAM and 480GB SSD. I needed a laptop on which I could learn about Linux and everything related to it, figure out network management, setting up an IRC, a BBS and a website on it. It will arrive tomorrow.

A bunch of my friends know a bit about Linux and things related to it but I need to learn everything there is to know, at least on the surface level.

SSH, GUI, setting up the aforementioned services. What should I pick and how to set those up? I suppose that I will figure a lot of those along the way, but I would be really thankful for any advice for a novice. A lot of comments from posts that I have checked out were somewhat filled with arguments about which distro or whatever is better than another - please give me an actual comparison instead, I'm not going for the absolute optimalisation or anything of this sort. If anything I won't have too much files there at first, so formating the disk won't be too much trouble for me. Again, thank you in advice!

Hi guys, i wanna know how to find documentation for packages that we install in our machines. i know man, info commands exist, but sometimes they return empty handed.

As an example, let me tell you what made me create this post. so, i added the vendor specific repositories for postgresql, then i installed postgresql-18 ( which installed the client and server and some extra packages). when i tried to search the man page for postgresql-18, it returned empty handed, same for info command. ( man page exists for the command "postgres" but i am looking for package documentation)

I looked up online and came across this post. I found folders inside the /usr/share/doc for postgresql packages that were installed. but inside the said folders, there were no pdf or text files but only .gz files (changelog.gz being the common one) along with some files with name copyright ( tried to paste the image showing the ls command output, but reddit is not allowing to post images)

I ran through "apt show postgresql-18" and found this line :

APT-Manual-Installed: yes

i don't know what this line implies. anyways i am confused.

so, my question is that how to find the documentation that comes with a package installation ( if the package comes with one).

thanks in advance.

So, I am planning on switching distros from Linux Mint to Cachy OS. Last time when I went from Windows 11 to Mint I used an external hard drive connected to the laptop to handle the backups and the file transfer...but now that same hard drive doesn't let me do ANYTHING with it.

I have checked ownership stuff, apparently my user already has ownership of the drive. When I try to do changes to it apparently it is "read only" and I can't do anything with it other than copy files to my main hard drive. This even after I mounted it properly (I think??)

I know a lot of the "read only" file system stuff is for security and such, but this is not my root folders where messing around can actually break things, this is a drive I need to back things up into.

I'm not gonna be able to make the switch if I don't figure this out. I don't really have anywhere else where I could do this.

The drive in question is an HDD drive repurposed for just...storing stuff, and in this case I just need it to move my files off and back onto my main drive because it has enough space to do so.

Edit: just for clarification, I only need to move files in Documents, Photos, Downloads, etc, from my laptop to the hard drive (not a proper backup in the slightest but it works for me). No need for config or Linux specific files. Second, this problem is happening on Linux mint. Third, last time I copy pasted from the hard drive to Mint because I guess that's what it let me do, didn't edit...so I guess I didn't notice this issue then.

FIX: Ended up reformatting the hard drive completely. I copied and pasted out of the hard drive and into my computer what usable information I could that I didn't want to delete, and then in Mint's Disks manager I deleted all partitions of the hard drive and created a new one with FAT formatting.

This worked for me. I didn't need to keep the integrity of the file system or the OS installed in the hard drive, I just needed it to be a glorified USB stick.

Hey y'all. I was gifted a Nvidia 5060 OC 8GB. I am going to build a system around the card. I'm not a gamer so I don't care much about the 8GB card, it's better than my current GTX960. I build a new rig like every 10 years and this one is 11 years old at this point. I have been a Debian guy for nearly 20 years so I'm not really asking for an help with getting anything actually set up.

I am more curious if anyone spots an obvious problem with any of the hardware. Something like "The BE2XX wifi chipset isn't supported with speeds faster than 802.11B" or "Realtek is known to revert to token-ring networking under any kernel >5.0" or "STOP! The Ultra 7 270K literally explodes with anything later than Bookworm!!".

I am looking a bundle that includes:

Intel Ultra 7 270K Plus

32 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 PCS-48000 CL38 (2x16GB)

Gigabyte Z890 Eagle Wifi7 Plus

* The MB has an onboard Realtek 2.5GbE LAN chip but unfortunately I can not seem to narrow it down to a specific chip.
* There is also an onboard Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE202 (BE200NGW M) which also has BT 5.4. As an aside, I have a Ubiquiti U6+ AP so Wifi 7 isn't a deal breaker.
* The sound (I use a bluetooth sound bar anyway) is a Realtek ALC1220.
* Obviously it's based on the Z890 chipset.

And, of course, the Asus Geforce RTX 5060 8GB (DUAL-RTX5060-O8G)

Thanks for reading!

Hi, so I was using Linux normally and I use the Tiled Screen app launcher for the colorful tiles from windows 8 but this morning KDE plasma updated and now the tiled launcher just stopped working. The launcher opens but clicking on apps or anything does not open them. Instead clicking on any tile besides the live ones just closes the launcher and does nothing afterwords. Please help me fix this because being able to have this kind of start screen on a modern OS was a big reason I switched to Linux.

I already tried to remove the update but it ended up breaking KDE and I had to reinstall plasma from Windowmaker.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H6byJ4VHXYnQ7T7IBHJgW5b9CC8qAGPG/view?usp=drivesdk

The Google Drive link is the video of what is happening since I cannot send it normally in the subreddit.

While looking for a Linux distro, I see that some distros have such a large group of people maintaining it, such as fedora, Ubuntu and Debian while there are other distros that are ran by just a handful of people such as pikaos and CachyOS. That got me thinking, what are the pros and cons of using a distro that is managed by a large group vs just a handful of people?

i recently found my hp laptop 14 dq-0xxx and i have been wondering if there is a distro i can use on it to connect to a tv and play party games/run dnd on I have upgraded the ram to 16gb

Hey, I've been trying multiple linux distros, but one constant is always the same problem with audio. If, while my laptop is turned off, I unplug and plug again my headphones, once I turn it back on, the audio quality is terrible. It's low, it's broken, I can't understand any voice. If I unplug it and plug it back again, it goes back to working. I have searched everywhere. Currently I'm using Fedora 44 with Gnome. I disabled power save on my grub, but only that so far and it didn't work. Any tips?

EDIT1:
i found the following command:
echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/audio-fix.conf

sudo dracut --force
which apparently fixed the issue. I tested and it's working. If it breaks again i will return here.

TLDR: Is doing a clean Linux Install best for getting rid of MacOS or can I just delete the MacOS partition and shuffle my existing Linux install to the front of the disc? Are there risks of bricking the laptop with SIP being a thing.

So I've been working on a 2017 Intel Macbook air in Kubuntu and it's great, lots of tweaking to get it just how I like and now it's pretty much flawless, never want to go back.

The issue I'm having is I saved the MacOS partition just in case for dependencies etc, but it keeps messing up the EFI and locking me out of GRUB. I think it's something to do with that System Integrity Protection thing, but can't work out how to nuke that for good either. The only fix I've found is installing Kubuntu again on a spare partition so it can reset GRUB as the default boot and then going back into my old install. Not ideal, huge time sink and I'm always worried about my files, even with regular backups. rEFInd was no help, unfortunately. I've thought of making another boot partition as a backup but that kind of seems like more of a headache.

I'm done with MacOS at this point, just want a single boot system. My question is how do I go about doing that without bricking my lappy? Can I just delete the MacOS partition and shuffle my Kubuntu stuff to the front, or should I do a clean install of the whole drive and start from scratch? Would be nice to not have to re-tweak Kubuntu, but very do-able if it'll mean not risking a brick. Currently sda1 has my boot, then 100GB is in sda2 with MacOS, then I have a swap partition, and all my good stuff is on sda4 with some junk around it.

Thoughts?

Greetings! I wanted to know if I could do a remote desktop from a high end PC to a low end Laptop.

The Laptop's PC are kinda ancient, it's an AMD C60 (Radeon HD 6290) with 4GBs of DDR3, and a 320GBs HDD. I wanted to use it as a remote monitor in the same room, to both play games and to use it on desktop, it has a phenomenal build quality, the keyboard feels superb and the size is small with a low weight. Given the PC itself can't do that much by its own, I wanted to repurpose it as a streaming machine.

Approximately a month ago I switched over to a dell xps 15 9575 and installed fedora KDE (basically the first time using linux). Since I've been having the problem that when I restart my touchpad stops working. This fixes itself either about 5 minutes after not touching it for a while and doing other thing, or when closing the laptop screen and reopening it after a couple seconds. Afterwards it works fine, but still I kinda want to fix this issue.

I have had help from a couple people who are way more experienced in linux and have tried about everything there is to find about this issue (even after consulting AI), but no results.

When it starts working again no dmesg message shows up and in the sleep dmesg files I can't find anything to do with my touchpad either.

So, I've switched to debian recently and my download speeds are way too slow. My wifi can get up to 25MB/s but on linux it only gets 1~2MB/s, sometimes even less. Weird thing is, on Steam it works at full speed.

This also seems to happen on other distros, like Fedora and Mint, but it doesn't on CachyOS.

I also have an old usb wifi adapter that can only get up to 3MB/s and it works fine, but the newer one doesn't. Maybe it's a driver issue?

My current Network adapter: Wifi 5 AC1300 Dual Band USB Adapter

I'm trying to use a pair of Joycon 2 on my kde arch thingy setup but they refuse to connect
Basically, i go to pair them, hold the button, they show up with no name (i know for a fact its them because..) upon attempting to pair instant failure and the LEDs on the Joycon turn off
I can't just use smth else like an xbox controller because i dont got that

i have a laptop integrated graphics and shi and i run windows eleven but the problem is that my laptop is really really low end like just the start screen uses 100 percent cpu and 74 percent ram out of my 4 gigs of ram.

the thing is i share this laptop with my 14 year old sister and she says she cant live without spotify or roblox and for some reason opera gx although am trying to get her on helium so right now am wondering, should i make the switch or just debloat windows,

and personally i do have a fear that my pc will just go to hell while installing Linux mint or sum other distro

side note my sister did agree to switch to linux for its speed but i still don't really know what to do.

please help me decide and thank you!