A Gentle Introduction To Linux (for Linus Tech Tips viewers)

so a few weeks ago linus and luke from linus media group which is the parent company behind the linus tech tips channel on youtube these guys decided they were going to do a linux challenge they were both going to switch away from windows to linux on their home computers and there was a punishment the one that switches back to windows first is going to get punished in some way so these guys have been trying out linux and it's really great because this is huge news for the linux community because linus tech tips is the biggest tech related channel on youtube they're not just the biggest tech related channel linus tech tips is actually the 11th biggest channel on the entire youtube platform that's tens of millions of people that have never heard about linux or considered using linux they're not going to hear about linux for the very first time from the linus tech tips channel and while linus and luke's linux challenge i'm sure it's going to be very entertaining it's going to be some fun content to watch you know these guys they don't have that much linux experience their linux experience is rather limited i'm not sure if they're the ones to properly introduce linux to the world i think it would be better for a seasoned linux veteran to do that and that's why i'm making today's video i want to introduce you guys properly to the world of linux so what is linux well technically speaking linux is not a complete operating system unto itself linux is actually just the kernel now what is a kernel well a kernel is the main component of an operating system it's the core component it's uh basically your core interface between your hardware and the processes that run on your computer the kernel it communicates between your hardware and the processes that are running and that way the kernel basically manages your system's resources as efficiently as possible the kernel is so named because it's almost like a seed or a pit or a kernel of a fruit or a vegetable think of a think of like a peach think of the pit of a peach it's basically a big seed in the middle of that peach and it really doesn't do much like if you had a peach that was nothing but that pit it's kind of useless right and that's the same way with an operating system you know the kernel by itself can't do anything and the same thing with that peach that peach with that pit without the fleshy goodness around it we really don't have much use for that peach right that's the same thing with our operating system so on desktop computers and servers we have the new utilities in conjunction with the linux kernel and that creates the operating system on our desktop computers and because that's gnu utilities with the linux kernel sometimes people refer to desktop linux as gnu slash linux but you can combine the linux kernel with other suites of software and other core utilities to create other kinds of operating systems for example there are billions of phones around the world that use android as their operating system the android operating system at the heart of it sits a linux kernel linux actually runs on countless billions of devices around the world we're talking about from computers to phones to cars to kiosks to tvs to microwaves to refrigerators linux actually powers most of the world's computing devices so why use linux instead of windows or mac os well back to specifically talking about desktop computers why run linux instead of microsoft windows i could probably list 100 different reasons why linux is just plain better than windows but just to limit myself for sake of time i'm only going to name a few of the biggest reasons why linux is better than windows number one linux is faster than windows that's just a fact linux is much much much faster than windows especially on older hardware if you have a machine that's four or five or six years old and you're trying to run windows 10 or the new windows 11 on that machine how long does it take for some of your programs to open you probably click to open a program and it takes 30 seconds maybe a minute and sometimes when you're using the program the program's slow menus take forever to load and it's just painful it's frustrating and maybe if you thought the only operating system out there was microsoft windows which is what many people think they think everybody in the world uses windows on their computer and everybody has to deal with these frustrations no linux users don't deal with that kind of frustration because linux is fast programs open instantly menus open instantly and especially on older hardware older hardware that windows either struggles to run properly on or in some cases refuses to run it all on linux can run on machines that are 5 10 even 15 years old pieces of hardware that are so old that windows simply will not install on those machines linux can actually revive those machines and it'll run like a champ so number two you have dozens of different desktop environments available to you on linux what's a desktop environment that's your user interface that's your desktop it's what you see right in front of you in linux the possibilities are endless you don't like the desktop environment you're looking at you can remove it uninstall it install a different one on windows you have one desktop environment you have the windows desktop that's it if you don't like it well you better learn to love it because you can't remove it and you can't install a completely different desktop environment a completely different user interface that's just not available to you but on linux customization is king if you don't like any part of the operating system itself you can swap out anything number three windows is huge compared to linux and when i say huge i'm talking about the download size i'm talking about the install size i mean when i install windows in a virtual machine it tells me i need like 60 or 70 gigabytes of disk space just for the base install not installing any extra programs no games or anything i need you know 60 gigabytes to install windows that's crazy linux typically the linux isos i download are almost always under two gigabytes in size and when they're actually installed they typically install in eight gigabytes of disk space or less number four linux is free and open source software so linux is free as in free of cost linux is also free as in freedom meaning it respects you the user when we talk about free as in freedom it means you can modify the source code you can look at the source code you can do anything you want to do with your operating system because again it's your operating system microsoft windows is not your operating system because it's not licensed under a free and open source license microsoft windows is proprietary software meaning when you sign up for windows you install windows you agree to the microsoft end user license agreement the eula and part of the eula states that you don't really own that operating system you're kind of just renting that thing from microsoft that operating system is theirs you can't look at the source code you can't modify the source code in any way and that microsoft reserves the right to check on you to spy on you and everything you do on your computer every keystroke you press on the keyboard they could be monitoring that and they are monitoring that number five linux ships with tons of free applications so when you install your linux distribution typically it'll install 30 40 50 programs out of the box for you your office suite text editor your multimedia programs video player audio player things like that all of it is free and open source software so it's free as in cost it's also free as in freedom meaning it's licensed under a free license you can do whatever you want with that piece of software and if you're a big proponent of free and open source software like i am linux is great because there are thousands sometimes tens of thousands of free and open source applications available to you in your software center inside your linux distribution in fact linux has more free and open source software available than microsoft windows does number six linux is more secure than windows and linux desktop users don't even run anti-viruses because honestly it's not like viruses don't exist in linux but they're so rare i've never really met a desktop linux user that ran an antivirus me personally i've been a linux user for about 13 14 years primarily a linux user on the desktop i've never run anti-virus on any of my machines number seven linux respects your privacy windows spys on its users it uses its users data mines its users it monitors every keystroke it knows exactly what files you're opening on your system and knows what you're browsing inside internet explorer microsoft edge it's it's really doing some nasty nefarious things to you the user because in windows you know you are not using windows windows is actually using you you are the product when you use windows when you use linux linux is actually the product you use linux so which linux distribution should you install well if you're brand new to linux so you've been a windows user your whole life you're just now hearing about linux for the first time from linus tech tips or from anybody else which one should you install well one of linux's biggest strengths and also its biggest weakness is the fact that we have hundreds of linux distributions the reason we have this is because anybody can build their own linux distribution we've already talked about linux is free in open source software the kernel all the applications or the gnu utilities so anybody can modify them you know package them in any sort of way and create their own linux distribution and because of that we have literally hundreds of linux distributions out there now that can be really confusing to a new to linux user but i'm going to simplify this for you because right now i'm going to narrow down that list of hundreds of potential distributions down to three that i think are perfect for the new to linux user number one linux mint linux mint is a very popular desktop linux distribution it's very easy to install very easy to use you don't need some high level of computer expertise to use linux mint and linux mint has three different desktop environments available to you there are three main desktop environments all three of them look very similar to the windows paradigm to the windows desktop yeah it has a panel at the bottom kind of your start menu at the bottom left it's really comfortable if you're a windows user you would be very comfortable in any of the three editions of linux mint linux mint is also very stable because it's what we call a static release distribution a static release means that there are releases of linux mint every few months every couple of years and when that new release comes out you will upgrade from your current version of linux mint to the new version of linux mint so static release is very stable because your applications never really receive updates the only updates you receive are security updates bug fixes things like that but your actual applications when you install linux mint version whatever that application your office suite and text editors and things like that typically they're going to be on that version until you upgrade to the new version of linux mint that comes out next year or whenever and another really great selling point of linux mint is the fact that they have a friendly and helpful community so if you're new to linux i suggest strongly consider linux mint first if you have any kind of issues go to their forums there's a ton of very friendly people there willing to help you number two manjaro manjaro is also very easy to install very easy to use just like linux mint it has three main desktop editions except unlike linux mint i can recommend all three desktop editions of linux mint i cannot recommend all three desktop editions of manjoro but i can recommend two of them to you kde plasma and xfce those desktops are very similar very familiar to the windows user you guys are going to be quiet at home and either kde plasma or xfce manjaro also has a main edition called gnome i would avoid that one because it's very very different than what you're used to inside windows now manjaro differs a little bit from linux mint because it's what we call a rolling release rather than a static release so a rolling release means all your applications get updates constantly every time there's a new update to anything that update gets pushed to you what this means is manjaro never has a point release a big release that you have to upgrade to like one major version of manjaro to the next you're always on the latest manjaro as long as your system is up to date you're always running the latest manjaro now there are pluses and minuses to running a rolling release rather than a static release the pluses are you get the latest and greatest software right and this is really important especially for gamers when sometimes you need the latest and greatest kernel or video drivers to make your gaming experience better that's fantastic now the downside is because all of your programs are constantly being updated that means there's a bigger chance that some things could break on you but don't worry breakages are rare and usually when things do break they're very easy to fix i mentioned you don't have to be a high-level computer expert to run linux mint you also don't have to be a high-level computer expert duran manjaro i will say you need a little bit more tech savvy to run manjaro because when things break you may actually have to do a google search to find how to fix that error you may have to enter a command line or two to actually fix the problem but it's typically not as scary as it sounds if you're one of these do-it-yourself kind of people like you know when you have problems you tend to fix them yourselves manjaro is a perfect distribution for that kind of person for somebody like if you're installing this on your grandmother's computer then something like meh would probably be a better choice than manjaro one final thing about manjaro is they too have a very friendly and helpful community if you have any kind of support questions go to their forums they'll be glad to help number three luboontu now luboon 2 is one i'm going to recommend for a specific use case if you have older machines or underpowered machines you need something that can run on older hardware ubuntu is fantastic for that for people with newer machines i would either choose mint or manjaro but luboontu if you have something that's five seven ten years old i'd strongly recommend trying luboon2 first because it runs a desktop environment called lx cute which is really designed for underpowered machines and like both mint and manjaro it's easy to install it's easy to use you don't have to be a computer expert to use this thing or anything you'll be right at home immediately windows users are going to be perfectly at home because the lxq desktop environment actually looks like some older versions of windows think windows 98 windows 2000 kind of look it doesn't look that dated it actually has a modern fresh kind of look to it but it's got that same kind of workflow as something like windows 2000 luboontu is also a stable static release model distribution so you don't have to worry about things breaking because of packages updating also being based on ubuntu which is its parent distribution lubuntu really you'll find all kinds of documentation about it because there are so many ubuntu based distributions so many desktop computer users use ubuntu-based distributions which is also an ubuntu based distribution you'll have no trouble finding documentation about any kind of problem that may arise now that i've recommended some distributions for you guys to check out how do you actually try out these linux distributions because you probably don't want to immediately just wipe out windows and install linux and hope for the best right you probably want to test things out a little bit so there are several ways to test these things the most common way is to use a usb stick you what you do is you download the iso for a linux distribution burn it to a usb stick plug the usb stick into your computer reboot the computer and you will boot into linux which will run off of this usb stick it actually won't touch your hard drives so windows will never be overwritten or anything because you're not even touching the hard drives in your computer everything is running off of this usb stick when you're done testing out that linux distribution unplug the usb stick reboot and you'll be back in windows now if you've never actually burned a iso to a usb stick you're probably wondering how to do that well all you need to do stick your usb stick into a usb port on your computer and then use a iso burning or a disk burning utility the one i typically use let me switch to my desktop i use this program here called etcher this is bellina etcher it is available on both windows and linux may also be available on mac i'm not sure but all i would do is i would plug in this usb stick and then you will select a file on your system so flash from file and i if i go to my downloads directory i actually have several linux isos here including ubuntu which i mentioned earlier i could burn that to this usb stick to take about i don't know five ten minutes for that iso to burn to this usb stick while it's plugged into the computer and once it's complete you're ready to go and you're ready to test out things another common way to test out a linux distribution is to install it inside a virtual machine what is a virtual machine well it's kind of like a fake computer it's as another way to install an operating system without ever touching your hard drive without ever wiping out your existing operating system and the one that i would recommend you guys try out first as far as virtual machine programs is a program called virtualbox virtualbox is available on both linux and windows and let me show you how to actually install something through virtualbox so let me launch my virtual box here and what you need to do go to machine go to new so we're going to create a new virtual machine let's i've already downloaded the luboon to iso remember i had the ubuntu iso in my downloads folder so i'm going to name this virtual machine luboontu and then type linux now if it's windows you would of course select windows bsd bsd but ubuntu of course is a linux distribution what is this based off of ubuntu is based off of ubuntu 64-bit and then i'm gonna click next and then how much memory do i want to give this particular uh virtual machine right now by default it's set to one gig i'm gonna give it i'll give it about six gigs so i'll change that to 61.92 by megabytes about six gigs of ram and then click next by default it's going to say create a virtual hard disk that's what you want if you're actually going to install ubuntu inside the vm and that's what i'm going to do so i'll create that vdi is the virtualbox disk image is selected by default leave that as the default click next dynamically allocated for the hard drive that's what you want it's selected by default just leave it click next and then create the size of the virtual hard drive by default it's going to choose 10 gigabytes i'm going to bump that up to 20 gigabytes just to give my virtual machine plenty of room in case i want to install some extra software now that i've created that virtual machine here you see ubuntu it's powered off now what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click on it go into settings because you do want to change a few settings before you get started the first one i always change is system i go into processor and i have a 12 core 24 thread processor so it makes sense to give this thing more than just one core by default i usually give it two cores of my cpu which is my uh thread ripper is actually a pretty beefy cpu so two threads is actually plenty just to test things out in a virtual machine so i would change that then i would go to display video memory you have up to 128 megabytes of video memory you can give a vm go ahead and give it the max 128 megabytes is actually not that much so always just max it out the next thing you need to do is storage because we need to attach the iso the iso we downloaded from the luboon 2 website so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to add optical disk here and then it's going to ask me where is the iso i'm going to go to add and then search my file system in the downloads folder i have luboon 2110 desktop and then choose and now that i've added the ubuntu iso there we could actually go ahead and start the vm one last thing i'll do is user interface i'm going to go down here i'm going to tick off that menu system i don't want to see it i'm going to take off that menu system the bottom systray that would appear in the windows typically i i just don't want that stuff to appear because it's kind of useless information appearing on the screen then i'm going to click ok then let's go ahead and start the virtual machine and this is my virtual machine of luboon2 it's going to boot up all right and we've logged into our new virtual machine of luboom2 so what we're looking at here is the live environment it's just booting directly off the iso the same as booting directly off a usb stick but if you wanted to actually install this properly inside the vm you would double click install ubuntu and run through the installer and the installer for all these linux distributions is very easy typically you click ok about three or four times give it a username and a password and in about 10 minutes you're done with the installation so just for the sega completeness i will run through this installation of lubuntu so american english is my language i'm going to click next uh the chicago central time zone in the u.s is correct for me i'm going to click next english us is correct for my keyboard layout i'm going to click next and then what do i want to do with the disk erase disk and give the entire virtual machine to ubuntu or do i want to manually partition now that's useful if you're going to dual boot alongside another operating system but i'm just going to run luboon 2 by itself in this vm so erase disk is what i want i'm just going to click next now i'm going to create a username dt is my username i need to create a strong and complicated password for the dt user so there's my password let's confirm that password and then i'm going to click next and then it's going to give us a summary of everything we chose and everything looks good i'm going to click install and away we go that's the installation i wait about 5 to ten minutes and the installation will be complete how easy is it to install linux and other than trying out linux on a live usb stick or inside a virtual machine of course you can always try out linux on a test machine if you have more than one computer just be aware that computer hardware varies so don't be surprised if you test things out on a test machine and they work perfectly and then when you go to install it on your main production machine things work a little differently the next thing we should talk about is how do you install software on linux because it works completely different on linux than it does on windows so in windows typically you go and download software from various places on the internet and then install those programs on your computer and that's very very very dangerous that's why windows is riddled with viruses and malware and ransomware and things like that is because you can't just trust any piece of software you find on the internet that's not the way we do it on linux you actually have central repositories of software on linux a repository is a server that has all of the software there and it's curated by your linux distribution meaning you can actually trust everything in that repository or at the very least you can trust it far more than you can random pieces of software you go and download on the internet so let me switch over to this virtual machine that we just finished installing ubuntu it took like five or ten minutes to install this virtual machine of luboontu and if i go into system tools uh ubuntu has the muon package manager now this will differ from various distributions every distribution though typically will have a graphical package manager this is basically a graphical front end to that repository of software so the tens of thousands of pieces of software that are available in the ubuntu repositories you could actually do a search for them right here for example if i wanted to do a search for firefox which is already installed it's the default browser but you can see if it wasn't i could search for it there it is i could click on it and i could get that thing installed rather easily i can also update the entire system for example if i do check for updates it will find all the packages that we have installed that have an update available and upgrade for us so that is how this is handled generally in linux again this is far safer on linux than it is on windows where of course in windows you're getting pieces of software from hundreds of different places and that's just not secure now other than the graphical software centers i mentioned every linux distribution may have a different graphical software center so they all look a little different they all function a little different but you can always use the command line so i could actually open a terminal and if i wanted to let me zoom in here a little bit i could actually enter this command here inside any ubuntu based distribution i could do sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade and that would upgrade the system just like we did in the graphical software center but you could do that here in the command line a matter of fact the command line and the graphical user interface they're actually running the same command the only thing is when you have the graphical program and you click the button that says check for updates what it's actually doing is it's running this command it's just giving you a button to click instead of not making you type this but they're basically doing the exact same thing and the reason i mentioned the command line is because really the next thing we should talk about is the linux command line because windows users typically have this misconception that if you're going to use linux you have to learn the command line you have to learn shell commands and you have to be a nerd and although most of us are nerds myself included you don't necessarily have to be a nerd to use linux you don't have to use the command line it's actually completely optional these days these days if you want to live happily in linux and never open a terminal i mean you never have to see a terminal unless you really want to but i strongly advise you guys if you're going to make the switch to linux to become familiar with the terminal because it does allow you to do some things that you you really couldn't do on windows much more powerful things than what you could do on windows so now that i've given you this brief introduction into linux maybe you want to learn a little more maybe you're interested and you really want to do a deeper dive into linux well if you really want to learn more about linux these days a great resource actually is youtube there are so many good linux channels on youtube if you go to my youtube page and if you're not subscribed to me please subscribe check out some of my content i've been doing uh youtube for about four years now i've made more than a thousand videos about various linux related topics at this point but if you go to my channels tab i'm subscribed to about 100 maybe 150 different channels and all of these channels are linux channels or tech related channels that will occasionally talk about linux and these are great channels all of these guys they do fantastic work covering linux as well as other free and open source software and i know i've learned a lot from these guys so that's why i'm subscribed to all of them and also why i'm telling you guys to go check out all of those channels as well because again they've helped me out a lot i know you're gonna learn a lot from these guys as well so now all that being said if you're one of these new to linux users or one of these people that are on windows and you're really considering switching to linux let me go ahead and welcome you aboard i think you're going to love your time here now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this show i'm talking about the following people gabe james mitchell paul scott west economy ellen chuck commander angry curt dioco david dillon gregory heiko lee maxim michael mike nitric sir john alexander piece of arson fedor polytech raver red private stephen and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched it wouldn't have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen right now each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen help support my work over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm just sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to help me out please subscribe to distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace i wonder if linus is going to try out xmonet

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 127,002

Keywords: how to, operating system, windows 11, operating system basics, linux, gnu linux, linux vs windows, switch to linux, switch to linux from windows, linux is better than windows, linux mint, manjaro, ubuntu, lubuntu, what is linux, which linux distro, live usb linux, virtualbox, linux in a virtual machine, learn linux, linux commands, linux operating system, linux gaming, linux tutorial 2021, linux tutorial, distrotube, linux distro

Id: G4C2pMVTxao

Length: 27min 57sec (1677 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021

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