I didn’t realize this community existed and posted my other thread about linux distros in another community, so I’ll try rectifying that here.

I’m trying to learn as much about linux as a desktop system as I can before I dive in to installing a distro on my computer. I do have a tiny bit of familiarity with the terminal from having servers running Debian, but those I get a lot of help with. the distro I’ve chosen is Bazzite, which is based(?) on Fedora if I recall right. I liked the stuff it comes with (I love video games) built in and I like the idea of the atomic desktop setup.

so, what are your tips and tricks for a new linux user? what about outside resources? I’ve been doing as much digging for articles and videos as I can, but I thought asking the community might be a good idea too. I’m trying to compile these resources for myself and my partner, so that we have stuff to learn from and reference.

as a final question, what got you into using linux over windows or mac?

thanks in advance!

  • Prison Mike
    2•5 months ago

    Not related to your point, but I always felt like piping from cat to grep is crazy inefficient. I’m a programmer so I imagine grep is much more efficient at finding stuff in files (in chunks maybe?) whereas cat likely reads the entire thing into memory (somehow less efficiently) to send it through the pipe.

    …though now I’m wondering if my understanding is off.

    • @Laser@feddit.de
      2•5 months ago

      I don’t think that’s what’s happening. There’s no hard requirement for cat to read everything straight into memory. It can send data once it’s available, and the receiving process can read it as fast as it wants. There are cases where this might be more clear: Let’s say you have a big video file that you want to convert to something that only supports like y4m input and is not in ffmpeg. A common way is something like ffmpeg -i infile -f yuv4mpegpipe - | encoder --y4m outfile - I’m pretty sure ffmpeg won’t read the whole infile into memory, nor will it store the whole y4m representation in memory. Instead, it will decode infile as necessary and push into the pipe at the speed the encoder can handle.

      But yeah, I remember something about tar using libraries for compression being more efficient that piping its output to a compressor. So it’s still the better route, but probably not as much better as you think.

      • Prison Mike
        1•5 months ago

        Good points. Yeah, rethinking it it doesn’t make sense at all that it would read the whole thing into memory.