Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!
I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!
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I installed Debian today. I'm terrified to do anything. Is there a single button backup/restore I can depend on when I ultimately fuck this up?
timeshift is pretty good, but bootable btrfs snapshots are even better
These have both saved my ass on numerous occasions. Btrfs especially is pretty amazing.
You want a disk imager like clonezilla or something. If you’re not ready for that just show hidden files and copy your /home/your_username directory to a usb or something. That’s where all your files live.
I ran Linux in a vm and destroyed it about... 5 times. It allowed me to really get in and try everything. Once I rana command that removed everything, and I remember watching icons disappear as the destruction unfolded in front of me. It was kind of fun.
I have everything backed up and synced so it's all fine. Just lots of reinstalling Thunderbird, Firefox, re logging into firefox sync, etc.
Once I stopped destroying everything I did a proper install and haven't looked back.
This will be my 7th year on Linux now. And I have to say, it feels good to be free.
Another perspective: Your question implies you want to try out things with Debian. If this assumption is correct, I would highly recommend you just create a virtual machine with qemu/libvirt and learn within this environments/try out things there before doing stuff 'on the metal'.
Of course backups are always a good idea and once you got your feed wet you might want to learn about 'Infrastructure as code'. Have fun!
That's a fantastic suggestion and I've already been doing exactly this :) but, I've done it just enough to know that I'm really really good at breaking stuff, and I don't want to wait to fully transition from windows. Hence the need for full system backups