[Linux] bronkish:
To folks like me there are 3 primary reasons Linux is my operating system of choice, since 2001, creating devices notwithstanding....

1 - stays the hell out of my way - at all times, my hands are not tied

2 - no financial obligations, no ridiculous subscriptions, nobody owns my machine but me

3 - produced and maintained by the world, not some company

4 - privacy, in tact

5- security, an ongoing process made simple and workable because Linux

6 - everything is a file

Back in the day I wrote a debian tutorial site that gained a lot of popularity. Of course, my aim was to help Windows users leave that pile behind and get with Linux, but, alas, it was far more popular with the Linux crowd. Poke around, it may be of some value even today, which, brings me to yet another terrific reason for using Linux - just about everything on my old site is applicable today, it still works, though it's from the 00 - 10 decade.

EDIT: Actually, my swith to Linux was in the late '90's for the express purpose of running a web server. There was no way I was using IIs or Windows for such a purpose. I was hooked immediately.

I want to talk about one very cool aspect of using Linux: aliases. An aliases is a handy command that stands in for another, longer or messy one, maybe a thing you do a lot and don't want to write a script for.

So, as an example, I have a handy alias for using my favorite package manager to - clean, purge, and or fix the apps on my system. A few years ago this command was more necessary than it is now, but, I still use it.

Have a look -

alias cpf='sudo aptitude clean && sudo aptitude purge ~c && sudo aptitude -f install'

If you look at that line you can easily see what's going on. The command I want to run is: sudo aptitude clean && sudo aptitude purge ~c && sudo aptitude -f install

Well, that's a lot to type. Pffft. Instead of typing all that noise I now only have to type: cpf

EDIT: aliases are run in the terminal. Seems obvious, I know, but, just to avoid confusion.

If you're running Linux right now and you are hearing about aliases for the first time - happy birthday!! You're gonna love this. In your ~/ (which the machine reads as /uname/home/) you will find a file called: .bash_aliases. If it's not there, for whatever reason, just make it. In a terminal just do: nano .bash_aliases.txt, enter. Now, you're in the file, add your stuff. When you're finished, to save and close do: ctrl+x, y, enter.

Here are a few of the aliases I use on my machine, in no particular order or grouping:

alias clients='sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24'

alias ns='sudo netstat -alnp --protocol=inet'

alias wpupdate='~/development/update.sh' - this is handy. it uses wp-cli and points to a little script I wrote to make updating/upgrading wordpress sites better. to use it - in a terminal I type - wpupdate, and then it asks me for the subdirectory, I type that in and bam all updates occur.

If you are using wp-cli locally, be sure to add this to your aliases file:

alias wp='sudo -u www-data wp'

alias cdv='cd /var/www/html && ls -la'

alias lamp='sudo systemctl start apache2 php7.4-fpm mysql'

alias aphp='sudo systemctl restart apache2 php7.4-fpm'

alias lampkill='sudo systemctl stop apache2 php7.4-fpm mysql'

alias pikill='sudo systemctl stop pihole-FTL'

alias ftl='sudo systemctl restart pihole-FTL'

alias mysql='sudo mysql -u root -p'

alias ownit='sudo chown -R www-data:www-data'

alias findbig='find . -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n -r | head -5'

alias cleancache='sudo /sbin/sysctl vm.drop_caches=3'

alias nap='sudo /usr/sbin/pm-suspend'

alias again='sudo shutdown -r now'

alias off='sudo shutdown -h now'

alias pscpu='ps auxf | sort -nr -k 3'

alias sources='sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list'

alias makepwd='head -c 12 /dev/urandom | openssl enc -base64'

alias pwgen='pwgen -ys 24 1'

I have loads more broken down by function in the file. Aliases are awesome. Your desktop, or window manager (I use openbox) can do similar, and/or supplement. Openbox, can, anyway. In openbox you have a couple files, one is rc.xml. rc.xml is the file that controls keybinding, keyboard shortcuts. Love it. I hit win+m for my email. You know, this isn't anything new, this functionality has been around for decades.

You need no dev knowledge or skills to run Linux. None at all. If you want, however, oh, the places you'll go....

People in this thread have asked for advice on which Linux distribution to use, and rightly so as the ecosystem is vast. I'm not going to recommend any because it's problematic. I want you to run and like Linux, because it's awesome. What I don't want is to confuse you. Now, LinuxMint and Ubuntu and so many others are fine Linux distributions, certainly. However, they are built upon another in all cases. I don't have to tell you about more moving parts or layers, do I? Personally I have run into trouble will all manner of distros (yes, even Ubuntu) built upon another, because they were built on another and for implementations, scripting, all that - to make their ideas work. In 20 years with Debian it's always been: flawless. But, I didn't just recommend Debian. (Shhh - USE DEBIAN!!!)

If you want to try Linux then try one of the base distributions the others are built on for a trouble-free operational lifetime. There are major differences in the main base Linux distributions, but, you don't have to worry about any of it, mostly it's just package management - LSB be damned!! I don't know if you can still get Red Hat - I think it's just fedora, or centos, but, this is one of the base distributions. Fedora is a bit beta, and you use centos for your server.

If you're a masochist, roll up Gentoo. You da man!

THere is Arch Linux, Debian, Slackware (the oldest), and, OpenSuse. Maybe Mandriva, is that what it's called now?