Confusion with LOTS of new things to learn in Linux
by AlwaysNoiseless from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5DF7C)
Hello,
So I decided to install Gentoo and to begin with this distro as my main "daily-driver" to delve into the world of Linux and FOSS and all the inner-workings of a computer system. Before Gentoo, I had some brief experience with Mint, Ubuntu and Arch/Artix, but only used them for a few days and not more, so I'm still a noob!
Gentoo is interesting, and I like it, at least for the time being! After using the official installation guide, I'm left with so many things unknown to me. The wiki pages of different distros are indeed nice, but I've never been good enough with reading wiki articles because I'd get redirected to almost endless chains of related articles. Is there a step-by-step resource (aside from LFS which I find it to be too complicated and a little boring for now!) to learn as much as possible?
As an example, I have some problems with Xorg and the confusion of desktop environments and WM's and whatnot, but I really don't know much enough about X11 and all the different terms related to it, but I'm super curious and interested to learn about them. Someone in another forum told me to edit the ".xinitrc" file. I got curious and ran the program catfish as root as searched for "xinitrc". It gave me all the following results:
Code:/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc
/home/myusername/.xinitrc
/root/.xinitrc
/var/db/repos/gentoo/genome-base/gdm/files/gdm-2.32.0_xinitrc_ssh_agent.patch
/var/db/repos/gentoo/media-tv/mythtv/files/xinitrc-r1
/proc/11268/task/11268/cwd/.xinitrc
/proc/9545/task/9545/cwd/.xinitrcI'd want to know what are those files and why there are so many of them, but there's no simple answer to this. There are also many different window managers like i3, i3-gaps, DWM, XFWM (and XFCE), KDE and LXQT things... and each of them has its own world of manuals and wiki pages.
Another example: What's the difference between all the similar directories in PATH?
Code:/root/.local/bin
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/bin
/sbin
/bin
/opt/bin
/usr/lib/llvm/11/binAnother example: Why there's a black bar at the bottom of screen after resuming from suspending to RAM (XFCE)? and not when I lock the screen when the computer is still on.
Another example: Why grub suddenly is able to identify my Windows 10 encrypted with VeraCrypt installation, and not at the beginning? I once pressed 'c' to enter the command mode, and then I entered the exit command, and it automatically got to the VeraCrypt bootloader and since then, grub is able to identify the Windows installation, so is this the reason?
So you see, I have many question in mind, while there are many questions regarding sound in Linux and WLAN. I still don't have sound and WLAN and I find the wiki pages too deep to begin with. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack...
Any advice would be much appreciated! :confused:


So I decided to install Gentoo and to begin with this distro as my main "daily-driver" to delve into the world of Linux and FOSS and all the inner-workings of a computer system. Before Gentoo, I had some brief experience with Mint, Ubuntu and Arch/Artix, but only used them for a few days and not more, so I'm still a noob!
Gentoo is interesting, and I like it, at least for the time being! After using the official installation guide, I'm left with so many things unknown to me. The wiki pages of different distros are indeed nice, but I've never been good enough with reading wiki articles because I'd get redirected to almost endless chains of related articles. Is there a step-by-step resource (aside from LFS which I find it to be too complicated and a little boring for now!) to learn as much as possible?
As an example, I have some problems with Xorg and the confusion of desktop environments and WM's and whatnot, but I really don't know much enough about X11 and all the different terms related to it, but I'm super curious and interested to learn about them. Someone in another forum told me to edit the ".xinitrc" file. I got curious and ran the program catfish as root as searched for "xinitrc". It gave me all the following results:
Code:/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc
/home/myusername/.xinitrc
/root/.xinitrc
/var/db/repos/gentoo/genome-base/gdm/files/gdm-2.32.0_xinitrc_ssh_agent.patch
/var/db/repos/gentoo/media-tv/mythtv/files/xinitrc-r1
/proc/11268/task/11268/cwd/.xinitrc
/proc/9545/task/9545/cwd/.xinitrcI'd want to know what are those files and why there are so many of them, but there's no simple answer to this. There are also many different window managers like i3, i3-gaps, DWM, XFWM (and XFCE), KDE and LXQT things... and each of them has its own world of manuals and wiki pages.
Another example: What's the difference between all the similar directories in PATH?
Code:/root/.local/bin
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/bin
/sbin
/bin
/opt/bin
/usr/lib/llvm/11/binAnother example: Why there's a black bar at the bottom of screen after resuming from suspending to RAM (XFCE)? and not when I lock the screen when the computer is still on.
Another example: Why grub suddenly is able to identify my Windows 10 encrypted with VeraCrypt installation, and not at the beginning? I once pressed 'c' to enter the command mode, and then I entered the exit command, and it automatically got to the VeraCrypt bootloader and since then, grub is able to identify the Windows installation, so is this the reason?
So you see, I have many question in mind, while there are many questions regarding sound in Linux and WLAN. I still don't have sound and WLAN and I find the wiki pages too deep to begin with. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack...
Any advice would be much appreciated! :confused: