Quote:
Originally Posted by
metacogitans
Haha. I started out typing trying to ask this as a serious question though, which OS would be best for tinkering around with but not overly burdening on a user?
Good. Now we are making progress.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
metacogitans
I should mention I'm going to be using Unix for the first time, but I'm competent with computers, and the reason I want to use Unix is to because I want to learn more skills and I'm sick of Windows basically telling me I'm not allowed to.
When you are coming from Windows you probably might want to use Ubuntu or a similar beginners-oriented Linux. The extensive interface is helping the beginner. I am not the biggest fan of these all-integrated desktop solutions but i have to admit these GUIs are like braces: they hinder you to run effectively but help you to learn walking. As long as you learn to walk use them, consider doing away with them once you start running. So you might reconsider your choice and select, say, FreeBSD once you have worked for some time with UNIX, but start easy and step up later.
But even then, UNIX (i use a very loose definition here, including Linux, FreeBSD and a few others) is at the base very similar: most things in UNIX are configured via configuration files and different GUIs are just different ways of filling these files from a graphical interface. Understand the exact syntax of the config file and you could do the same with a simple text editor, probably even faster. This is why your choice of a certain GUI will always be a reversible one. Take one you like and when your preferences change take another.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
metacogitans
Also, with the having two operating systems thing, how easy is it to use one operating to gut the other operating system to just the command line while keeping perks of that operating system (file types unique to that operating system, etc.)
I'd only want a second operating system if it didn't take up any CPU (as them various operating systems out there seem to like to do, all the time for little or no reason).
You can set up two different OSes alongside, having them share the users data. I do that routinely when i set up a new laptop, because if i happen to configure the "main" OS into oblivion i can still boot the second OS and repair that. Because OS, applications, application data and user data are strictly separated in UNIX it is easy to have two separate installations of the OS which share a common set of the non-OS data.
What you are about, though, is perhaps a virtualised "guest" OS running in a virtual machine. There are several solutions to this and they all work - save for certain details - equally well. You do not have to run such a guest OS in background, you can start it only when you need it. It is even easy to clone such a vertual system (its "hard disk" is in fact a file on your disk which you can simply copy) and i make heavy use of virtual systems for test purposes: i have a (actually several) prepared standard-images and if i want to try something potentially dangerous i create a copy of one of these, fire it up, execute the test and if it works - fine, if it doesn't: i just scratch the system and start over with a new copy of the image.
Such virtual systems will take up no resources at all if they are not running (save for a few GB of disk space for the disk images) but to run maybe even several of these at the same time you needs some RAM. If you consider buying a new system my suggestion is: you might not need the latest and fastest in processor technology, but it should be a 64-bit processor and you should consider a minimum of 16GB of RAM. Linux can run in 2GB comfortably, but fire up 3 different Windows-guests with 4GB each and that leaves only 4 of the existing 16GB to your host system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
metacogitans
Also, my strategy with learning the various new commands and any coding or whatever is to just shamelessly speed-use google for the commands or whatever I'm looking for,
I always just google my code whenever I need code for something for whatever reason, and its never taken me more than 25 seconds to find the code I was thinking of
UNIX is - probably more so than any other OS - about
understanding what you do, even more so than knowing the detailed way to do it. You can easily google a certain latin phrase or word, but this will not be the same as really speaking latin. But even if speaking latin fluently you might profit from having google at your disposal as an extensive dictionary for the odd wod you don't know.
There is no shame at all in using reference material, as there is no shame in a translator using a dictionary. It still doesn't exempt him from having to
understand the language he is translating. And it doesn't exempt the systems administrator of having to understand how things work.
I hope this helps.
bakunin