Comment by ulkesh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ulkesh | Hacker News Reader

So it's a tutorial where the goal is to be able to take a screenshot, post to Reddit, and feel cool. There are a few pieces of good information, but it's for people learning Linux (how to install, run a package manager, etc), not power users, which I would define as someone who understands a lot of the OS and takes as much advantage of the system at hand.

I feel as if I'd qualify as a power user, who has used Windows since the 3.1 days, who has used MacOS since the Tiger days, and who has been using various Linux distributions since 1999 -- I definitely wasn't the intended target audience of this article.

With a title of "Linux Guide for Power Users," I was hoping for some interesting scripts or relatively unknown applications that might be fun to tinker with. I always love to learn something new that I didn't know before (an example: recently I discovered TimeShift which is really a fancy wrapper around rsync and BTRFS, but it's a pretty nice GUI to help create and restore snapshots that I wasn't aware of before).

> This guide is meant as a loose inspiration for a poweruser looking to switch to Linux.

Yea the title and the intro sentence have a subtle, but very important difference.

And I appreciate the effort but I’m ultimately still confused who the target audience is. I’ve only ever used macOS (like ~9 years computer experience) but currently setting up Gentoo, and being a “power user looking to switch to Linux” myself, I would’ve found it more helpful to summarize the Linux equivalents and added optionality to macOS “power user” things.

Eg u use yabai on mac, well here’s i3 and [other options]. Desktop environment? You actually can choose and here’s an overview. Like it went from “eli5 what’s a distro” to vim keybindings so there was that inconsistent definition of “power user.”

I’m obviously biased in terms of what I wanted to see but my larger point is the inconsistency

Yeah, I don't really know what a 'poweruser looked to switch to Linux' even means. It doesn't compute. A poweruser is a highly proficient user. If you're looking to switch to Linux from Mac, you might be a Mac poweruser but you're not going to be a poweruser in Linux, because you're starting mostly from scratch. And if you're a Windows poweruser, then you're going to be starting entirely from scratch.

So the generic 'poweruser looking to switch to Linux' really makes no sense to me. You can't just be a 'poweruser' in the abstract. A poweruser is a poweruser of something, the thing they are highly proficient at using.

Your first paragraph is spot on. A quick look at the ToC made me think it's a "how to reproduce every r/unixporn screenshot ever" rather than teaching something interesting about Linux for people well-versed in administering or using other Unix-like systems (e.g. Mac OS, FreeBSD, ...).

This may be oddly specific to myself, but I hate having to memorize internal IPs and like to address my computers with their hostnames. This article makes no attempt to tell me anything about hostnames, mDNS, DNS-SD, etc. on Linux. Is mDNS configured OOTB on most Linux distros like it is on Mac OS? If not, which implementations should I consider using? So on, so forth.

I also find it a bit amusing NeoVim is automatically chosen for the reader. I'll stick with Emacs, and I know many others will stick with VS Code or just plain old Vim. :)

mDNS does work out of the box mostly with systemd-resolve (and the right firewall rules if you only allow certain inbound traffic).

You can add something like avahi and have Linux do more interesting things like reflection between interfaces/networks--critical for segregating your Chromecasts and other IoT devices.

I get that some people want to switch from macOS to Linux, but why would they want to change from *BSD? In all likelihood, one uses a BSD precisely because it's not GNU.

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