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!

  • @Kuvwert@lemm.ee
    14•9 months ago

    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?

      • JulianEnglish
        6•9 months ago

        These have both saved my ass on numerous occasions. Btrfs especially is pretty amazing.

    • @bloodfart@lemmy.ml
      8•9 months ago

      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.

    • @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
      4•9 months ago

      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.

    • @wolf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      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!

      • @Kuvwert@lemm.ee
        2•8 months ago

        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

    • @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
      1•8 months ago

      Install everything from store, and you should be fine. If you see a tutorial being too complicated, it is probably not worth following. Set your search engine to past year and see if there are better tutorials.

      You might also want to consider atomic distros, they are much harder to mess up, and much easier to restore.

        • @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
          1•8 months ago

          Oh! in that case may I suggest yachts with docker containers? https://yacht.sh/

          Everything on my homeserver is directly installed on the server, keeping them up-to-date is pretty annoying, and permission control is completely non-existent.

          Since want to do things the hard way, I believe this can also be a good opportunity to do things in the “better” way (at least IMO).

          • @Kuvwert@lemm.ee
            2•8 months ago

            Ah now that does look promising, I had settled on portainer but this yacht program looks very noob friendly! I’ll install it today and check it out! Cheers!