 One of the best decisions that I've ever made was to switch to Linux full-time. I know it seems like quite a thing to say, but I love Linux. I started this channel because I like Linux, you know, I've made a lot of friends because of Linux. It's just, it's been a very good experience. But there are a few things that I wish I had known back before I switched to Linux. And that's what I want to talk about today. So today, five things that I wish I would have known before I switched to Linux, or at least at the beginning of my Linux adventure, let's just say. So the first one, and this is a big one and one that I've talked about before. And that is that distro hopping is okay, right? There is a bifurcation of the Linux community. Some people think distro hopping is okay. Those are usually the distro hoppers. And then there's those folks who don't understand it at all, right? There doesn't really seem to be a middle ground unless you have moved from one group to the other, right? Or maybe you're in the transition of moving from one group to the other. The thing about distro hopping is this, and I've talked about this before. Like I said, the best way to find out what works for you is to try everything. Even if you luck out on the first distro that you install and it works fantastically and you understand it and you can customize it exactly the way you want to and all this stuff, right? Even if you luck out in that fashion, you should still distro hop a few times because you never know there might be something even better on the other side. Now it doesn't mean that you will find something even better. There's also a chance that when you do hop away and go on exploration of all the other distros and then you eventually just settle on the one you ended up on first, there's a chance that the installation of that first distro the second time isn't as good as the first time you install it. Maybe something went wrong or whatever. So there are risks involved when distro hopping. There's no way to deny that, but it really is important for you to experience a lot of distributions when you first switch to Linux. I really truly do believe that all that said, of course, is going to make this next one seem a little weird because they don't go together. Number one and number two don't go together. And the second thing that I wish I would have known going in is that distros don't really matter. I know. It's really weird. I said you should go distro hop. Try all the distros, but the thing is, is in order to learn the second part, in order to learn that distros don't matter, you still have to distro hop because if you're anything like me, there's going to be something in your head that always thinks that there is a distro out there that is better than what you have right now. And you know, either it's because of your peer pressure or, you know, thinking of seeing other people enjoying fedora or gen two or arch or whatever, you're going to look at those guys and have a really good experience. I should go try that. The thing about that is, is that you have to have those experiences. You have to walk through the path of a distro hopper for a little while to understand that at the end of the day, distributions don't matter. Really, distributions just don't matter. What really matters is package management and package availability. I've talked about that before. Those two things are the things that really truly matter. Now, now obviously distros come with their own package managers. So what package manager you end up enjoying is usually going to be determinative of what your distro is. So there is some aspect of that, but for the most part, what most people care about, it isn't even really the package manager. It is, can I get the applications that I want? Can I get the version of the applications that I want first? So, you know, let's just say. Gimp 3.0 finally comes out sometime in the next 10 years. It's eventually going to come out. We know it's going to happen, but arch is going to get it first, right? We know that arch is going to get it first. Gentoo is going to get it first. The rolling releases will have it before a lot of other distributions, at least in their repositories. So your selection of distribution will matter if you don't want to use the flat pack or the snap, right? Because those are going to get it first too. And those kind of throw wrenches into the argument, right? Well, let's just pretend those don't exist. The idea is that your selection of distribution really only matters in so much as it determines when you get the applications that you want, or if you can get those applications. And that's what truly matters at the end of the day. But you can't make that determination. You can't learn that without being a distro hopper first, at least in most cases. There's going to be, there's those weirdos in my audience right now who have never used another distribution other than the first one they tried. Every time I talk about distro hopping, there's always one or two people in the comment section below that says, you know, I installed the boot, I've been using it ever since. Weirdo. OK, I could do a poll, and I almost guarantee that everyone's at least tried one or two distros, the vast majority of people. I shouldn't say everyone, the vast majority of people tried at least one or two. Many have tried many, many more, obviously. Those are the true distro hoppers. Those are, you know, my brethren, but the vast majority of people one or two distros before they finally finally settled on home. Very rarely do you find someone out there who installed a distro and then stuck with it forever, very rarely. So anyways, number one, distro hopping is OK. Number two, you need a distro hop in order to realize that distros don't matter. Those are two are conflicting. But let's go ahead and move on to the third one. The third one, and this is going to piss some people off, but the third one is the arch is not that hard and also not that special. I as a longtime arch Linux user, I can proclaim that arch is a it's a badge for you as a as a as a Linux scout. You know, you have to do it in order to get the badge. But once you've done the badge and you've, you know, you've used it for a while, it's fine. Like, there's nothing wrong with large links. Don't get me wrong. But it doesn't live up to the hype that the arch fanboys are going to tell you that it does. So the whole I use arch Linux, by the way, I'm special because I use arch Linux, calm down, you nerds. OK, it's fine. You know, the AUR is fantastic, even though I think it's slightly overrated. Arch Linux is not hard, not anymore, not with the arch install script. And it is not that special. It's just it really not there. There are other rolling releases out there, so that doesn't make any special. It's not hard to install anymore. I mean, like seriously, arch Linux's whole claim to fame was that it was a journey to install. Right. It was difficult to install. And the entire time that was happening, the gentoo guys are out there like you suckers. And then and then there's the Linux from scratch guys out there thinking, oh, man, you guys are so cute. You know, you want to see you want to see hard to install. Come on, man. It's going to take you 60 hours, at least minimum to install LFS. All right. So anyways, arch Linux is not that hard. It's not that special. And I wish I'd known that beforehand because I looked up to those arch guys, you know, and I still have friends in the arch community. I have friends who use arch. Many of the guys in my Linux discord that I talk to every single day use arch and there's nothing wrong with it. But in most of those guys just use arch because it's the distro that they like the most. And that's perfectly fine. That's the way we all are with the distro that we've chosen. But there's that small community of arch users who are very, very proud that they used arch and I looked up to those guys, right? I thought that using arch was the pinnacle of Linux nerddom. And eventually I had to join them. And I did join them for a little while. I was very much an AUR fanboy for a very, very long time, you know, a couple of years and I got over it. You know, I grew up a little bit. Now I realize distros don't matter as much as package availability. Can I get the applications that I need? Can I get the version of the applications that I need? And if those two things are true, I'm happy pretty much on any distribution. Yes, I have my, you know, I have my interests in Fedora. Like I really do like Fedora quite a lot, but mostly just because it's really, really stable, right? I could probably have the same experience on Ubuntu if I wanted to. I don't know if I could be so happy on Debian because the packages are so old, but maybe Debian testing, right? The point is, is that I have moved past my super fandom of Arch and there are those in the community that never will. And I think that if I had known beforehand that Arch wasn't so special, I probably would have ended up on a more stable distribution sooner. So that is number three. So number four is one that I've constantly had problems with over the course of my time with Linux and that it is OK. It is perfectly OK to ask questions. It really is one of those things that a lot of people don't have problems asking questions. Those guys usually ask a lot of questions. Some of them are questions that they really shouldn't have to ask. They should do searching on their own. And I've talked about this in my troubleshooting videos. Steps to take when you're troubleshooting a process or troubleshooting a problem, I should say. You know, the first thing you should always do is Google. And, you know, there's a reason why RTFM has become a thing and because a lot of people just automatically go to asking questions when they should at least try to look it up first. But moving past that, because of the whole RTFM thing, a lot of people are reluctant to hop into the community and actually ask questions when they have them. And I was this guy, too. Right at the beginning, it was very hard for me to go on to Reddit or into a, you know, a discourse forum or onto Discord somewhere and ask a question because I always expect it. I always feared that there was going to be the douchebag out there that says, you know, read the ethnic manual. And my response to that would always be, well, you know, I have read the manual, but I'm more on and I don't understand the manual, right? A lot of the technical stuff on Linux in the documentations of a lot of projects and distros and whatever, they're written in a technical manner. And I don't always get those on the first try, right? It takes me some time to get my head around. And I think a lot of people are like that when they first switched to Linux. They haven't learned the lingo. They haven't learned the way things are done and all this stuff, right? The problem is, is that the Linux community has garnered such a reputation for being prickly that it scares away a lot of people's initial instincts of asking those questions. And the thing is, is that the prickliness of the Linux community can be well deserved. But there is also a huge community outside of that that they don't care about your stupid questions. They'll perfectly, they'll ask, they'll answer them for you. Like, if you want to know what CD does and you're too lazy to go look it up, you know, whatever, and you just ask in my Discord, you're probably going to get two or three people go look it up. But someone's going to answer that question for you. And, you know, they'll also probably prod you into start doing some of your own research. But you'll get an answer, right? My point is, is that, yes, there's a small number of people who are the RT FM crowd, but the vast majority of people out there in the Linux community are perfectly willing to help out each other. And that's what makes the Linux community great. And the problem is that you don't learn that unless you hop into the community and start asking questions, you won't learn how great it is until you push past the whole RT FM, you know, community or the, you know, you got to get past the assholes until you so you can meet the actual good guys, if that makes any sense. So that's number four. The fifth one is the most technical out of all the ones that I talked about today. And that is that I wish that I learned to script sooner. If you're going to do one thing on Linux and, you know, you want to start diving deeper into doing things on Linux, you don't want to just live your life in a web browser. Learning to script is super important, I think. And the reason why I say that is because there are a lot of little things that I do every day, like I'm not a developer. I don't do any of the, you know, I'm just dabbling in Python now for the first time, so I can't claim myself I'm not a coder, any of that stuff, right? I'm a writer by trade. But there are certain things that I do every single day in the terminal on my machine in various places that is repetitive, you know, I do it every single day. One of the things, just for example, I have a description in every video that I have. It's the same description every time I just changed the what the video is about. I have a script that I wrote that I can press the keybinding that will add that description to the keyboard so I can paste it into YouTube. Without learning how to script, I would have never have known to do that. Now, it's just a simple script. It's like a one-line script. It's not anything complicated, but it's things like that. Things that you do every single day that scripting can help you do and can help you automate. And I wish I'd known going in how important scripting was because it would save me a ton of time in various applications, like in various situations that could have saved me a ton of time. And even now, you know, six years in or however long it's been, I'm still not a good bash scripter. I'm, you know, I'm just learning Python. I wish I had gotten started sooner and gotten better at it as I went along instead of just kind of really starting out now. So if you can take one thing from this video and you want to learn to automate some of your workflow, learn how to bash script. It can save you a ton of time. So those are the five things that I wish I had known for, or at least during my initial switch to Linux. If you guys have things that you wish you had known and you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast links for liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description if you'd prefer to support me on those platforms. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are just seriously so awesome. You guys just blow my mind every single day. So thank you so much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.