It’s a brave GNU world…
We help you get your bearings around the terra incognita that is GNU/Linux.
Since you’ve read past the intro it seems reasonable to assume you’ve some interest in installing and dabbling with Linux. Bravo. You may have heard great things about software freedom, about fighting back against software monopolies, or about the awesome power and configurability of Linux. By the same token, you may also have heard gripes about document incompatibility, rants about simple tasks being impossible without recourse to arcane terminal incantations, and terrifying accounts of being stuck in Vim (a text editor) for days. There’s truth in all of these. Linux has a lot to offer, but operating systems and users both can be fickle creatures, and sparks can fly (sometimes literally) when they clash.
See the box below for a quick primer on what Linux is, or read the Wikipedia entry. It’s good to know where we came from and what free software is all about. It’s common for people to conflate “Linux” with “desktop Linux distribution” which causes all kinds confusion. Linux in general is used everywhere from tiny embedded systems to the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The desktop is probably the only area it’s failed to dominate.
Today’s desktop Linux distros feature slick installers, impressive GUIs, repositories full of the latest applications, and package managers for easily installing them. These things are all decouple-able, which can be a hard concept for refugees from macOS and Windows to grasp. For example, the idea that you can install a new desktop environment without affecting underlying system settings and then continue to use all your applications as normal, might seem a bit alien. Indeed, the whole package management system is entirely at odds with downloading and running some random executable file from the publisher’s website (or a dubious mirror), but more on that later. You also won’t believe the things that can be done from the command line.
We’d be fools if we pretended installing Linux was rainbows and unicorns though. Things do go wrong, trainwreck wrong sometimes. For example, the 17.10 release of Ubuntu had to be pulled because it was corrupting the UEFI settings of certain Lenovo laptops, rendering them unbootable. And if you look in the Installation & Upgrades section of the Ubuntu forums you’ll find at least one post per day from someone who’s installation attempt has failed in some mysterious way. There’s usually more than meets the eye to such stories though, and for every calamitous installation there are probably a hundred that go without a hitch. People are less inclined to post when things go swimmingly, which is a shame really.
You can try out Linux straight from the LinuxFormat DVD without so much as touching any other OSes you may have installed. This won’t be as slick as running a proper install, and you won’t be able to save any changes you make, but it’s a great and hassle-free way to start exploring.