Dipped my toes into Linux maybe 10 years ago. It was awful and turned me off of it. Also the fact that I occasionally have to deal with some bespoke bullshit distro at work that does nothing that literally any tutorial I google says it will.
But I finally gave it another shot. Girlfriend got a smart TV. I got sick of ads. I had an old Intel nuc laying around that I bought for a dedicated DDR machine but it didn’t go great, so I stuck dietpi and pihole on it. Was still a mild clusterfuck and had dozens of open tabs trying to figure out what was breaking, but by 5am I had pihole configured and running, a plex server set up, and a desktop. Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.
Bad news is youtube ads come from the same domain as the videos so pihole is useless there, but I’m still having fun and very excited about what I can do with a cheap piece of hardware I thought was useless. For the next project I’m thinking maybe trying to de-google my Google home minis and have a locally hosted assistant, but that would probably take a ton of research beforehand.
Suggestions, encouragement, and harassment welcome.
Know what, I did see web front ends in the handy installer menu. I’ll check it out.
And I should’ve specified. My experience was awful, not Linux in general. Though I was using mint and following a step by step guide and apt-get update just straight up failed and I quit.
My issue is that it seems so damn esoteric most of the time. Like at work, we have what I’ll call an incidental Linux install. It’s managed by another company, but response time is slow so I handle most of the low level troubleshooting. Someone locked out a user account. I was able to get on as admin, but the commands I found by googling (faillock, passwd -u, and pam_tally) did nothing. Turns out it was pam_tally2. I guess it feels like the skill curve to start is so insanely high. Like what I did with my nuc was dead simple but it still took all night. That said, it was fun and I will continue my exploration until I’m comfortable enough to jump ship from windows on my main pc.
What I recently learned is if ‘pam_tally’ doesn’t work, writing it out and pressing tab multiple times will provide you with all possible commands.
So if you have ‘pam_tally2’ & ‘pam_tally3’ it will list those 2 for you.
Or just press tab and it will give you whatever command you have if it’s the only one.
Two years of writing out all commands, files and filepaths by hand before a friend told me about tab.