Comments by "" (@dingokidneys) on "Rob Braxman Tech" channel.

Although I only had Windows on my desktop at work, I managed to finagle access to a Solaris system on which I was able to automate a lot of things I had to do. I also managed to install Cygwin on my desktop system to give me many of those tasty Linux tools. I guess these days you'd try to use WSL. When work moved us all to thin client desktops I still managed to wrangle some of my favourite tools onto a network share from which they would run. That and more Solaris stuff. When the Solaris system became too out of date to interact with external systems I needed access to, I set up an AWS virtual server to handle the interface. Strangely, though I was an accountant and not an IT person, the IT managers who became aware of what I was doing - I didn't try too hard to hide it - didn't object. When I retired seven years ago I had to sit down for weeks with an IT guy to reimplement a lot of what I had set up in a way he could carry on after I'd gone. While I was there, if I handled stuff that the IT guys didn't really understand and didn't break things, they let me have free range. They knew I wouldn't do anything bad.
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I also started working seriously on computers in the 1980's, primarily with DOS. When Windows arrived on my work machine I hated it. It was slow and clunky. When I booted up first thing in the morning as soon as the Windows desktop came up I'd close out of it and get back to my beloved DOS prompt. I was however using a load of custom programs, some of which I'd written myself and some of which I'd carefully typed in from code in a PC magazine. I was already starting to toy with Linux about this time on my home PCs and at this time a GUI was advanced stuff and you had to write your own XFree86 config file to get it working. I did eventually just use Windows at work and to a lesser extent at home but I've always been attached to the command line interface. I'm a Linux only household these days and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Every machine I work on has a terminal session open as it's just the fastest and most precise way to do many tasks.
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That is a very "belt and suspenders" type approach but actually pretty good advice for people who are just learning, particularly if on a system they can't afford to break. Personally, I think that people who really want to learn should be free to break stuff. Then they have the learning experience of fixing it up again. I also think that people should do a lot more work on VMs which they can break with impunity. It they can't fix it, restore from a snapshot or just recreate the VM.
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You could see that he was causing himself permissions problems with that file he was creating. I also cringed when he did that.
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Linux has better hardware support, especially for newer hardware or odd peripheral devices. You will also find lots more Linux information for whatever distro you choose. FreeBSD is great and I run it on a small file server and on an old laptop. However, it doesn't support all the laptop hardware (i.e. camera, microphone, tap on trackpad to click). Unless you really want to learn a BSD for some reason, I'd strongly recommend that you just run with a Linux. There are loads to choose from and there's almost guaranteed to be a distro to suit anyone. Most of what you learn on Linux is directly translatable to the BSDs in any case.
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@turtle421 Your laptop may power off or it may not with the 'halt' option. You'd have to test it. It is more common these days when shutting down from the command line to use "sudo poweroff". There's also "sudo reboot" to warm reboot the system. The 'shutdown' command is old and more appropriate to environments where the hardware needs some careful handling on startup and shutdown; i.e. where disk packs needed to be loaded or unloaded but you still needed the device to be powered on get that to work. You might then invoke "shudown -h now", park the heads and unload the disk pack and then flick off the big red switch.
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@TheRealDrWho I used to use Notepad++ when I had to use Windows. There's a Linux package called 'notepadqq' which is very similar, but then there are lots of great GUI editors available in Linux. Geany is very Notepad++ like and I use that a lot. However, I usually use vim. I like command line editors having started out on DOS with edlin. Then I found a neat, tiny text editor that was way better - can't remember what it was called - and it worked very like 'vi' or 'vim' so when I flipped to Linux at home and Solaris at work using 'vi/vim' was second nature. I've tried emacs and I've used nano but both seemed clunky for the kind of stuff I was doing.
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🤣🤣🤣
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Therein lies the fun and a learning experience. I've buggered up my system with a bad fstab many times though I've been using Linux for almost 30 years. The last time was a few months ago with a little FreeBSD file server running on a Raspberry Pi. A sudden power outage, the drives not coming up clean and I needed to edit fstab to get the system to come back onto the network. With the RPi you have options though; either remove the SD card and edit the file on the card on another machine, or set up a serial console to another machine - which is a fun thing to do - and boot to single user mode. On another machine you'd probably need a bootable USB stick plus a screen and keyboard. It's good to practice different recovery techniques so you don't panic and make things worse in the heat of the moment.
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Don't use it for a desktop system unless to really know why you want it. It's a great server system. The thing about Linux is that it has support for newer hardware way before almost anything else. It also has much better desktop user support than the BSDs. Linux forums expect newbies. The BSDs essentially expect that you have some idea of what you're doing on that system and why.
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These days you see more and more Windows admin type stuff being done in a terminal; either CMD prompt or Powershell. It turns out it's a far more powerful and clearly defined way of getting important jobs done.
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Perhaps he meant it's the only OS that easily available to the average punter that is secure and private. The BSDs have come a long way but for people who find installing Arch Linux an insurmountable challenge, almost any of the BSDs are out of reach. Well they might handle Nomad or GhostBSD but even then ...
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