cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56890254
The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
Since you’re just starting you’ll want to make sure you have a good foundational understand of what Linux is and how it works. Understanding the File System Hierarchy, file permissions, user/groups management, etc will help the ‘feeling over your head’ part. There are a lot of Youtube videos/playlist talking about the basics, skim a few to see if you like how they’re presenting the information and pick whichever works best for you.
For a more structured approach, look for books (or a class at a vocational school if that’s something you’d do) teaching Linux+. This is an entry level certification by CompTIA and the course will cover all of the fundamental things that you need to understand.
Have a project in mind to motivate you. In the end, you’re learning all of this so that you can do something with Linux so pick a something that would improve your setup. Jellyfin running on a NAS is an good and achievable goal to start with.
Join some of the Linux/selfhost/homelab communities: !linux@lemmy.ml, !linux@programming.dev, !selfhosted@lemmy.world, !linuxmemes@lemmy.world. These are great when you’re stuck on something and need to ask for help.
On Reddit the homelab, linux and selfhosted subreddits are also good to read.
When you’re getting started and also when you have a problem remember: RTFM - Always, ALWAYS read the manual/docs and also check the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki. Asking for help without first reading the documentation and wiki is… frowned upon in the community. Some people will give you a hard time if your question is answerable in a Google search or in a wiki article.
LLMs can be useful as well. You have to be careful here because they can hallucinate and provide you with wrong information. LLMs that search and summarize based on your question will generally be more accurate but generally don’t run any terminal commands that they give you without first verifying what they do. Treat them like a search engine, a starting off point for you to do your own research. You could probably just ask for the exact terminal commands to setup a Jellyfin server on docker and get pretty far, but you wouldn’t learn anything and that will hurt your efforts to learn. I’ve been using Kagi’s AI assistant which includes a research agent option that has been pretty useful.
Finally, don’t avoid using the terminal, you can do a lot with a GUI but being comfortable with terminal use is fairly mandatory for anything but casual desktop use.