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Ask HN: What are the best maintained how-to sites for Linux?
A recent thread talked about a how to site that was well done but hadn’t been updated in a good 5 years. I’d love to have a list of Linux how to sites and reference#s for how to articles and just basic documentation from general, to distro specific, to scripting. As a macOS user, it’d be cool if there was another set of how to and reference sites that are up to date covering terminal for macOS, including using Zsh which the shell Mac is transitioning to.
It woukd be kid of cool to do a lot of stuff on the Mac command line. If you got really good at it, you’d be a far, far more efficient Mac user. Night and day difference.
Any suggestions on macOS terminal how to and doc sites, including ones that dive into zsh beyond just recommending Oh My Zsh, which is awesome, but it would be useful to find articles that dive deeper beyond just how to add on to Zsh to make it better automatically.
- cpach 5y agoHonestly, I know of no such centralized and up-to-date repository when it comes to Linux knowledge. However – have a look at https://www.freebsd.org/docs/ https://www.freebsd.org/docs/ – that is one thing that really sets FreeBSD apart from Linux.
- cpach 5y agoPS. When it comes to a shell for interactive usage, have a look at Fish shell. It’s a joy to get started with IME. https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/
- lofi_lory 5y agoFish is awesome, but it lacks features and shortcuts of bash/zsh, and it's sometimes hard to translate things. It's also quite buggy IME. Great out of the box experience. Tho, I wouldn't recommend it to new CLI users.
- danuker 5y agoHere's the Linux tag on SuperUser: https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/linux https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/linux
- danuker 5y agoHere is the Unix site on Stack Exchange: 200k+ questions: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions
- danuker 5y agoThe Arch Linux Wiki, which I find very useful (surprisingly even for other distros): https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/
- mraza007 5y agoNo doubt Arch Linux wiki is the one of the best resource for Linux.
- Arkanosis 5y agoThe helpfulness of the ArchWiki for people who don't use Arch can't be stated enough. As a user of several distros, this is my go-to documentation regardless of which distro I'm working with.
- threatofrain 5y agoIt's (almost) like the MDN of Linux.
- dharmab 5y agoI'd say the MDN of linux is man-pages, which is browsable online at https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html
- 5y ago
- Jiocus 5y agoHere's the Linux tag on ServerFault: https://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/linux https://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/linux
- blakesterz 5y agoI seem to have https://www.cyberciti.biz/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/ show up in my search results quite often for all those dumb little things that just fall out of my brain after not doing them for a year. The explainers are usually really good.
- geocrasher 5y agoI was going to say the same thing. I have found this to be a reliable resource. On the other hand I've found howtoforge.com to be the opposite of good and stopped using them a few years ago.
- quesera 5y agoI see these too, and sometimes the content isn't terrible. However, I always prefer some other source if possible. Every time I see the domain name cyberciti.biz, I expect the content to be scraped from the original source, and the page to be infested with ad-like garbage. I'm not sure if either of these are fair assessments. The former I have not investigated, and the latter is mitigated by aggressive content blocking.
- andrenotgiant 5y agoI am biased because I used to work there, but the how-tos on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials are well-maintained by a team of technical editors, writers, and paid contributors. They treat articles like code, the average article has 30+ edits, and reports of issues are triaged and turned into edits and updates.
- reilly3000 5y agoI'm a big fan! They are among the most usable docs on the web, and errata is incredibly scarce.
- skrtskrt 5y agoseriously about half of my bookmarks for leaning Linux and Kubernetes stuff are Digital Ocean docs
- afrodc_ 5y agoDigital Ocean has been one of the best resources for me earlier in my career. Such well written documentation and resources.
- noahtallen 5y agoHere’s a general how to site called Linuxize: https://linuxize.com/ https://linuxize.com/ I mention it because a large number of my recent “how to x on Linux” search queries took me to this site, and it typically answered the question at hand. It also has a really pleasant design, IMO, and is updated frequently.
- heavyset_go 5y agoIn a similar vein, does anyone have up-to-date resources for Linux kernel development?
- thinkmassive 5y agoThe Bash Reference Manual at gnu.org is my first choice for all things bash: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html
- throwaway823882 5y agoWe can probably bring back The Linux Documentation Project (https://tldp.org/index.html https://tldp.org/index.html) from its slumber with a fresh coat of paint
- Zhyl 5y agohttps://linuxjourney.com/ https://linuxjourney.com/ http://write.flossmanuals.net/command-line/introduction/ http://write.flossmanuals.net/command-line/introduction/
- smitty1e 5y agoWe must praise the mighty https://linuxfromscratch.org/ https://linuxfromscratch.org/ I recommend this to everyone interested building tech muscles: - set up a VM with a tool chain - a slice of storage - a weekend . . .and level up.
- 120bits 5y ago+1 for LFS. I have learned so much for it and just about linux in general.
- oplav 5y agoI find their installation docs for various programs really helpful too since it often walks through what each step is doing. For example, here's installing ffmpeg: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/multimedia/ffmpeg.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/multimedia/ff...
- fredski42 5y agoFor RHEL go to docs.redhat.com
- wdencker 5y agoFor an academic take on "how-to Linux", I'd recommend CMU's CS 15-213 course [1]. The systems class I took in college borrowed liberally from it, IIRC. Also, I'm putting together a master list [2] of the best resources from this thread and the other one OP mentioned. Let me know if I'm missing anything! [1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html [2] https://trove.to/wes/trove/learn-linux https://trove.to/wes/trove/learn-linux
- smoldesu 5y agoJust as a heads up, Linux and MacOS are not going to be "the same" in the terminal. While they're certainly more similar than say, the Windows command line or Powershell, the Darwin tooling doesn't quite match up with Linux on several occasions. Especially once you try extending your workspace, you'll run into some immediate party-stoppers. I like Homebrew and MacPorts, but neither of them are good enough to be a true "package manager" for MacOS, and it completely undermines the great Unix heritage that MacOS builds upon. OP, you might be caught between a rock and a hard place here: if you're already familiar with your terminal and piping from stdin/stdout, there's not really a whole lot more to learn. Apple isn't very forthcoming with details on the inner workings of MacOS either, so you're going to have a tough time fully grokking how to use the command line effectively. And even if you do manage to figure it all out, you're only trapped with what they give you. My advice? Learn ssh, and use it to connect to a real Linux box. That's how 90% of sysadmins do their work, it's how you should do it too.
- dharmab 5y agoNotable examples: - macOS uses BSD-style coreutils while most Linuxes use GNU coreutils. They have different args, output and behavior in many common cases. - macOS ships with Bash v4. Bash v5 is a common default package on modern Linuxes. - While the basic user permissions are the same, the OS security model is entirely different. There's no direct equivalent to namespaces in macOS and no direct equivalent to SIP in Linux.
- Kaze404 5y agoAre there any community efforts on solving those issues?
- davidcollantes 5y agoIn my opinion, Brew solve the first two.
- smoldesu 5y ago
- davidcollantes 5y agoI have found LinuxBabe (https://www.linuxbabe.com/ https://www.linuxbabe.com/) a very good Linux resource.
- technick 5y agoI used howtoforge.com some back in the mid to late 2000's and it appears to still be getting fresh content.
- dave_sid 5y agoman
- divbzero 5y agoA good HN thread on man from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311867
- m463 5y agoI think *.readthedocs.io should be mentioned. I've found lots of great linux documenation on that site in a clear and readable form. I don't know how to describe it, maybe as a sort of a github for docs?
- ece 5y agoOpensource.com has some good stuff. https://opensource.com/downloads/cheat-sheets https://opensource.com/downloads/cheat-sheets
- marttt 5y agoThinkWiki probably also deserves a mention here. Really helpful for hardware/software issues when you run Linux on a Thinkpad: http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/ http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/ The German version is great as well: https://thinkwiki.de/Hauptseite https://thinkwiki.de/Hauptseite
- chousuke 5y agoNot really a how-to site, but Red Hat's documentation has often been invaluable. It's freely available, and you can also get access to their knowledge base with a free developer account; it contains tons of useful stuff even if you don't use RHEL.
- t312227 5y agoshort list - what comes to my mind within a few minutes good old HOWTOs etc * https://tldp.org/ https://tldp.org/ my personal favorite distribution - with a social contract * https://wiki.debian.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/ the following distribution where the best entry-point for newbies at some time-periode & hat the advantage to provide a lot of good documentation about the specific distribution, but also linux in general ... at least in my perception gentoo was cool before ubuntu existed * https://wiki.gentoo.org/ https://wiki.gentoo.org/ and ah, and gentoo has a social-contract similar to debian :) then ubuntu was cool before arch existed * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ german * https://ubuntuusers.de/ https://ubuntuusers.de/ arch was cool until everybody discovered, that compiling your own shit is not so cool but pretty time-consuming ;) * https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/ idk ... whats the current go-to "distro for the technically interessted linux-newbies"? btw. not linux specific, but afaik there are lots of FOSS related docus available * https://readthedocs.org/ https://readthedocs.org/
- tucosan 5y agoTLDP is NOT a good source. It often comes up as one of the search results. Just go to the source: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html
- asicsp 5y agoIf you are interested in text processing tools, I have books on grep, sed, awk, perl and ruby one-liners. Free to read online: https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks I'm also maintaining a list of resources here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli_scripting.html https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli...
- crazypython 5y agohttps://www.android.com/ https://www.android.com/ is the most popular Linux. I think you meant to ask the best maintained how-to sites for GNU command line utilities.
- logix 5y agohttps://www.linuxuprising.com/ https://www.linuxuprising.com/