Learning Modern Linux

Preface

A warm welcome to Learning Modern Linux! I’m glad that we will walk this journey together for a bit. This book is for you if you’ve already been using Linux and are looking for a structured, hands-on approach to dive in deeper, or if you already have experience and want to get some tips and tricks to improve your flow when working with Linux—for example, in a professional setup, such as development or operations.

We’ll focus on using Linux for your everyday needs, from development to office-related tasks, rather than on the system administration side of things. Also, we’ll focus on the command line, not visual UIs. So, while 2022 might be the year of Linux on the desktop after all, we’ll use the terminal as the main way to interact with Linux. This has the additional advantage that you can equally apply your knowledge in many different setups, from a Raspberry Pi to the virtual machine of your cloud provider of choice.

Before we start, I’d like to provide some context by sharing my own journey: my first hands-on experience with an operating system was not with Linux. The first operating system I used was AmigaOS (in the late 80s), and after that, in technical high school, I mainly used Microsoft DOS and the then-new Microsoft Windows, specifically around the event system and user interface–related development. Then, in the mid- to late 1990s, during my studies at university, I mainly used Unix-based Solaris and Silicon Graphics machines in the university labs. I really ...