What better way to learn throw em into the Deeep end and when they do they will be all the better Linux users because of that steep learning curve and be active in the installed distro forum.
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I donât think that counts as a mistake on the part of a new user who canât afford a recent computer. The same would apply to hardware incompatibilities.
Those things should be handled by those of us who try to help, but we donât have the time. Apart from that we now have to distro-hop following the demise of 32-bit Ubuntu (mint etc.); some fairly recent Atom-based machines donât have enough soldered-in RAM to switch to Debian.
On that basis, I canât agree with
Having read the contributions below and made a couple myself, I guess a mistake for many people who âjust want to use their computerâ* is to have begun their journey.
*remembered quote from the late lamented Vista usenet forum
Concerning Windows, the biggest mistake was made by authorities and industry, who did not refuse to buy that operating system in the absence of a fully-compatible and fully independent second source. I donât know the present situation regarding, for example, electronic components but such items used to be unmarketable unless they could be bought from more than one manufacturer who had all the know-how.
The present situation is especially precarious because itâs become uncontrollably enmeshed in tracking, advertising and hacking interests. We should be allowed to have an operating system (at least) thatâs free from these activities and that everyone can use.
What I mean is, itâs down to the user to keep their OS up to date and fixing possible bugs that occur. No matter how much help you look for answers online, it will always depend on how much experience the user has with using command lines, writing scripts, as Linux has gotten easier I know over the years, but there is still the majority of OSes out there that can be troublesome, depending on use case of course? Up to a couple of weeks ago I would of recommended Manjaro as a good beginners OS, but the amount of things still breaking after upgrading. I cannot recommend it. I got fed up with Ubuntu based Distros, so moved to Arch ArcoLinux and yes there are some minor things wrong with it, but not to the point where software is no longer working, like in Manjaro.
My point being is no matter what Linux OS is installed, Debian, Debian Based, Arch or Arch based, Gentoo, Gentoo based, there will always be things to fix, but then again what do people expect from a free OS? Your average Windows user expects Linux to run all of their Windows programs, that they love to use. Gripe like hell or go back to Windows, when they realise that Linux does not run their software.
Does not matter what people are running on their machines, itâs knowing that things will be stable for the long term. Your average Joe couldnât give a monkeyâs armpit about privacy, which is why they use proprietary software in the first place. I would hate Linux if it ever got to the stage as becoming as popular as Windows or Mac, as that isnât what Linux was intended to be. Linux will always be a hobbyist OS, with the added advantage of being able to run it as a daily driver, running it exactly the same as in Windows, for emails, YouTube, light gaming, streaming Netflix, Disney, i_player, ITVX, My4, My5, online shopping with Amazon, EBay (If you really have to?) but with better support and better software. Before anybody moves to Linux try out Free and Open Source software first, to see if theyâd get on with it, within their Windows OS, before making the direct plunge over to Linux.
I guess that explains why I just upgraded my PC from W10 to W11, not that I like W11, but it is about the only supported Windows available.
It may run Linux but only as a hobby, using a VM. No stand-alone
Linux for this machine.
Hmm⌠the topics in the article (Top 10 Mistakes New Linux Users Make) seem more like non-Linux user mistakes to me. If people donât know what Linux is (mistake #2), then are they actually Linux users? 
If instead, we look at users who have successfully logged into a Linux machine and used it for a short time, there are some very interesting mistakes that happen at this point.
The biggest mistake Iâve seen is not understanding the difference between Linux commands and the shell. For example, they run ls *.py and think that the wildcard pattern *.py is understood by ls. Itâs not â the pattern is expanded by the shell before ls even runs, so ls never sees the wildcard. These users develop all kinds of superstitions about how Linux works at the command line.
Another big one is not knowing about job control (ctrl-Z, fg, bg). Iâve seen so many beginning programmers waste time by editing a file, quitting the editor, compiling the file, running the editor again, and trying to return to the code they were just working on. If they knew about job control, they could just type ctrl-Z to suspend the editor, run the compile, and run fg to return to the edit session. So much faster.
And hereâs a huge misunderstanding (which Iâve actually seen written in popular Linux books): believing that the âexportâ command makes a variable âglobalâ so its value is magically known to all running shells. Thatâs not how things work. The export command simply causes the variable and its value to be copied to that particular shellâs future children (child processes).
These three misunderstandings are so common that I gave them special attention in my latest book (Efficient Linux at the Command Line from OâReilly).
Couldnât disagree more⌠and to this day - I NEVER setup a separate $HOME /home partittion⌠I hate partitions actually - theyâre never a good thing (look what happend in the Punjab, or Korea)âŚ
What happens to new users who do setup /home as a separate partition, only to find they set it too small, or too large and now they need to change it - and then theyâre faced with the steep learning curve of using gparted / parted? And then only to learn, they canât resize a mounted partition, so theyâre also having to learn how to create a bootable system (e.g. a gparted boot disk) so they can resize their partitions laterâŚ
Iâm quite happy with the defaults that Ubuntu and most derivatives (like PopOS) do - i.e. roughly 500 megs or a gig fat32 for /boot, and the rest for â/â and I donât worry with swap, and when I do, itâs a swapfile on â/â - but my desktops got 32 GB, and my laptopâs got 16 GB, and I never need swapâŚ
One of the things I LOATHE mostly in my job, is having to micromanage some bullshit some âtheoristâ (AKA âarchitectâ) decided was an adequate capacity plan, using 1990âs yardsticks, for a system in the 2020âs⌠e.g. â4 GB for â/â, 4 GB for â/varâ, 5 GB for /home, 10 GB for /optâ et cetera bullshit⌠Maybe a bad example, e.g. if a pleb user can fill up their $HOME, and itâs part of â/â (not a separate partition) it could potentially cause an outage of the whole system when system process can no longer write to a disk 'cause a user has filled it with user garbageâŚ
I just find it a lot easier with LESS partitions, not more. But then I have the luxury (and personal preference) to AVOID dual booting as much as I avoid overly complex (and limiting) partition schemesâŚ
Linux is all about choices,
the choices are made to suit the person some prefer /home, some do not,
distro hop or stay with one distro for years
rolling or static
two partitions or over a dozen partitions
Your computer =Your choices
make the wrong choices then you are in for some cli lessons.
Yes not understanding what the shell does a big issue for anyone learning Linux. I can remember it took me ages to grasp sh and csh when I first started using Unix, because other interactive operating systems that I had experienced did not have shells.
As far as I am aware, the Microsoft command line is not a shell? I am not sure about PowerShell?. But it is true, ex-Microsoft users do not have any âshell conceptâ The learning curve is long.
All the best with your book.
Regards
Neville
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Multi-user computers are different from single user home PCâs.
Yes you do need to fence people in, in a multiuser system. I can remember /tmp filling up. Different story today.
A home user can simplify it and ignore partitions, quotas, etc.
The only use for partitions at home is to setup a backup strategy ⌠that is what @easyt50 is doing.
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Partitions at home can also be a good idea. Without a separate /home partition, a runaway X process can write millions of log messages to $HOME/.xsession-errors and fill the entire disk, making the computer unusable. Happened to me.
Also, with separate partitions at home, you can put different filesystems on different partitions. Thatâs helpful if you want to (say) encrypt only /home.
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Yes, it is 2 completely different environments, home vs business. I agree with a lot of what @daniel.m.tripp said about supporting a group of, or many users.
I must have either installed or recover my Linux PC a dozen or more times in the first 5 months of using Linux. Sometimes it was just to learn more about Linux and several times I needed to restore the system because of my mistakes.
I do not like loosing my data. I do not take daily backups at the end of day. So having a separate /home partition, I could either restore or install the root partition without losing any of my data.
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You guys and all these partitions are cracking me up, and are forgetting even the most basic question on how to even start an installation of any Linux.
And that is not hard to do, even without a separate /home partition.
The company I work for provides us with an OâReilly subscription. Iâll have to add that to my reading list.
A lot of new users start an install, and then get hung up on partitioning. It is the most confusing part of most installs. That is why you and I both recommend partitioning first with gparted.
Also some new users attempt a multiboot with windows at their first install. That is not ideal. Best to learn linux (including installs) on a separate machine or maybe a VM.
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Been preaching this for years, still remember my first attempt of dual booting XP with Ubuntu, it did not go well!!!
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Let alone recompiling a Gentoo kernel!!!