The Only Linux Beginners Guide You'll Ever Need

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Yo, what is up brotato chips? It's Zay here from the Zaybyte YouTube channel.

[00:00:03]Oh, and also I'm not going to fast fetch this video cuz freak y'all. Even though I fast fetched you guys are like, "Oh bro, don't fast fetch." Anyways, in today's video, I'm going to be like making the quote unquote ultimate Linux tutorial. Probably just me larping and making the thumbnail pretty clickbaity.

[00:00:17]So, um yeah, I'm probably going to milk the Linux penguin again. Wait, how many videos do I have with the Linux penguin yet? Literally so close to 10K subscribers, 9.98K.

[00:00:26]Benjamin Netanyahu, please let me hit 10K. Anyways, as you can see, my channel has a pattern. Penguin, penguin, penguin, penguin, penguin. And it it just goes on and on, right? Yeah, I keep on milking the Linux penguin cuz one, it gets me views, and two, I need to feed my cat. Anyways, in today's video, I'm going to be teaching you guys how to use Linux cuz well, a lot of you guys who are my viewers actually don't use Linux.

[00:00:48]I have prepared this whiteboard for you guys. First, we got to understand what is Linux. Linux equals kernel. You might be asking, "What the freak is a kernel?"

[00:00:56]So, kernel equals Is that what a kernel is? I'm pretty sure it is. So, basically a kernel acts like a bridge so that your hardware and your software can communicate with each other. There's actually a bunch of kernels in Linux. I use the Pika OS kernel. It is a custom kernel that my OS uses. You know what?

[00:01:12]Let me fast fetch. So, I'm using Pika OS, as you can see. Pika OS has their own kernel. And this is just one example. There's a bunch of examples of kernels. So, these are just some examples of Linux kernels that I've used. Cash OS kernel, the original Linux kernel, LTS kernel, and Linux Zen. If you guys are asking, "Which kernel should I use?" Well, performance-wise, this doesn't really have too much effect. But what I noticed, the biggest difference was the support. Cuz uh on my MacBook, I was only able to use the Linux kernel, the original one, in order to get the Wi-Fi working. If I use Zen or LTS, my Wi-Fi just straight up doesn't work. In my opinion, just use what kernel that your distro ships with.

[00:01:49]Or if you want to do experiments, you can install one of these and try out which one works best for you because again, this just really depends on you and your hardware. But for the majority of people, I just recommend the either the Linux kernel or the Linux LTS kernel. I think I explained what is Linux pretty well, right? Anyways, let's just move on to the next segment, picking an OS. If we go on this website called DistroWatch, as you can see right here, there's a bunch of distros and you guys might be like, "That is way too much. How am I going to pick?" Okay, so most of the distros here aren't even worth the trying. But I'll recommend some distros that are worth trying for you guys. So, these are the distros that I think are worth trying. This section is for people who I need to get my system working ASAP. Mint and Zorin OS literally don't require any setup. You can install it and get it up and running. No setup required. The drivers, the everything is pre-installed. Oh, and if you're wondering, "How do I install Mint or Zorin OS?" I'm assuming you use Windows. Search Linux Mint on my search engine, go to their website, and I just hit download. Download the Cinnamon edition. They have a bunch of mirrors here. Just choose which one is closer to you. But on Windows, you're going to need something like Rufus. You're going to pick your USB drive and then pick your ISO. Oh, and by the way, the file system, just use FAT32 for the file system, and boom, click start, and just wait it out till it finishes. Eject your disk, boot into your Linux ISO, boom, install it. Anyways, let's get back to this. Now we have the Arch-based distros, but you get your handheld while you do it. Did that sound sus?

[00:03:16]Basically, um Cash OS and EndeavourOS is Arch, but easier. There's also Amarchi, but kind of bloated in my opinion, and I would just be better off installing either EndeavourOS or Cash OS. Arch is a rolling release, so you get the latest and greatest updates, but may lack stability, and your system might just break. Yeah, that's the beauty of Arch.

[00:03:34]These are the best quote unquote gaming distros. Cash OS is also good, but forgot to add Cash OS here. If you're a gamer, I really recommend just installing either one of these. I've never tried Bazzite. I've tried Nobara for like a little bit, but I'm pretty sure Bazzite's also pretty good. You can't really go wrong with any of these.

[00:03:49]Oh, and the FPS difference is so insignificant, literally. You won't notice like a big FPS difference with these distros, and they all use really low RAM usage. For the all-rounder, in my opinion, is Fedora. I use Fedora on my work laptop, my newer gen ThinkPad.

[00:04:02]It works so good. My workflow has improved so much with Fedora KDE.

[00:04:07]Hopefully I explained that pretty good, but um >> [laughter] >> I don't know if I'm a pretty good explainer. Anyways, let's move on to the next section, which is package manager.

[00:04:16]Package managers, in a nutshell, is basically this. Yeah, it's basically that. What I recommend doing here is doing research on what package manager your distro uses. I use a Debian-based distro, so I do sudo apt install to install an app. And if I want to uninstall an app, I use sudo apt remove.

[00:04:32]It's different for distros. For Arch-based distros, you use sudo pacman.

[00:04:37]Or if you're using a Fedora-based distro, you do sudo dnf. Yeah, basically you just need to do research on what package manager your distro uses, and you're good. It's literally not that hard. It's that simple. It might seem scary at first because one of my friends installed Cash OS, and then when I told him, "If you want to install an app, it's better to use the terminal and typing sudo pacman," and he literally uninstalled Cash OS. But dude, installing an app from the terminal is literally way faster than GUI in my opinion. So, in a nutshell, this is what a package manager is. That was package manager. Let's move on to the next one.

[00:05:08]The next one is desktop environment and window manager. On Linux, you can either have desktop environment or window manager. Or you can even install both of them in one operating system. So, for the desktop environment and window managers that I recommend trying out are these. These are the ones I personally have used and I personally recommend.

[00:05:25]All of these window managers are kind of hard for beginners. The easiest one that I found was Hyperland and Neery. i3 and DWM is kind of hard, but kind of not at the same time. Also, guess my window manager. For the desktop environments, I either recommend KDE Plasma. You can also make it a window manager. It can look from this to this, by the way. It's basically the definition of Windows if you give it steroids. Gnome is for users who like macOS. It's pretty good for laptops as well. I'm not even going to lie. Gnome is pretty good if you use your laptop. But on a PC, I'm not the biggest fan of Gnome. But at the end of the day, Linux is freedom, so you can basically pick any of these that you want. I don't really recommend window managers if you're complete beginner to Linux. Just stick with KDE Plasma or Gnome. But if you want to explore window managers, for your first window manager, I really just recommend Hyperland because um it is the easiest by far to customize. They also have blur animations built in, so you don't have to install third-party. Because on i3, if I want blur, I have to install something I think it's picom or something. Yeah, I think it's that. I've never really used it. So, yeah, these are the desktop environments and window managers that I personally use and I recommend myself. So, let's move on to the next point. All right, so the next one is the terminal. The terminal can look scary. Yes, cuz you're left with this when you open it. There's basically nothing here. Here is where shells come in handy. So, these are an examples of shell. Fish, Zsh, and Bash, etc. Of course, there's a lot more shells out there. What I recommend for you guys who are beginners are Fish. So, with Fish, I actually get auto suggestions and uh look, if I type in nvim, as you can see, it auto suggests. I'm making a website.

[00:07:01]As you can see, it's a website project for client of mine that I'm working on.

[00:07:05]This is why I use Fish, cuz it really requires zero configuration. For a person like me, I don't have too much time in the world, so I just use Fish, you know? So, to check what shell are you using, just do echo, and then dollar sign shell. As you can see, I use Fish indicated with the /user/bin/fish.

[00:07:22]So, how do I install a shell? Because I use a Debian-based distro, I do sudo apt install fish, and then I hit enter, type in my password, and as you can see, Fish is already the newest version for me.

[00:07:33]So, if you want to start Fish, do fish, and it literally just starts Fish. Now, if you want to set Fish as your default shell, what you're going to do is do which, and then fish. All right? So, you got to copy this. You're going to want to do this command called chsh -s and the shell location, and then your username. And that's literally it. You just log out, log back in, and your shell should be changed. So, these are the terminals that I recommend. But the most user-friendly one is Kitty in my opinion. Cuz if you want to theme Kitty, it's actually pretty easy and straightforward. So, as you can see, I'm on Kitty right now. And if I don't have time to make my own custom theme on Kitty, I just do kitten theme. Kitty has their own repository, and they have a lot of themes here. Like let's say I want a Gruvbox theme, cuz my desktop is Gruvbox themed. I just do slash, and then I type in Gruvbox. Oh, and let's say you want to set the background opacity of the Kitty terminal. You can use uh nano, which is more beginner-friendly. Let's just use nano for curly line thingy, and then dot config/kitty, and then kitty.config. I really recommend just using like a shell that has auto-complete by default, so it's easier, you know? The font size, background opacity. I recommend having confirm OS close to zero cuz I set the confirm OS close to one. See, it has this, which is kind of annoying in my opinion. You can also set the font family right here, as you can see. And if you want to further customize the theme and you don't like how the preconfigured theme from the repository looks like, you can customize the current theme.conf.

[00:09:00]Anyways, that was the terminal. It's really not that scary. So, these are the terminal commands that are essential for Linux, in my opinion. A lot of these are related to the Linux file system basics.

[00:09:09]This is where the next point comes in, Linux file system basics. In Linux, everything equals a file. Hardware, like even your keyboard and mouse, are treated like a file. There's no separate drives like drive C, drive D. I have two drives on the system, an HDD and an SSD.

[00:09:26]So, my HDD that I use to store my videos and my games is located in my HDD disk that I used to store videos and my games is located on /mnt. Let's do cd /mnt/sussy.

[00:09:40]Sussy's the disk name. Now, you might be asking, "What do these individual folders mean?" So, home is basically Home has the things like documents, downloads. Like right now, I'm in home.

[00:09:50]Let's do ls. Oh yeah, I forgot to set my videos to store on my HDD. Home has desktop, documents, downloads. Now, for Etsy, Etsy is where most of your system configuration files are located. Let's do a CD / Etsy. A lot of the dot conf are located here. Var is a variable data, which is cache, logs, and temporary files. So, if something breaks on your system, logs on /var can help you find what's there. Now, usr or I'm pretty sure user is where most programs live. All right, so that was the Linux file system basics. Let's move on to the next point, ricing. I think a lot of you have been waiting for this. Ricing is a part of Linux and in my opinion, ricing is like making your workflow the best for you. The stuff that you should mainly focus on when ricing is one is picking a good color scheme. Find a wallpaper that fits your color scheme like box. I use a wallpaper that matches my terminal, as you can see.

[00:10:50]Now, three is make a good stack. What is a stack? It's basically apps combining together and making an effective workflow. Now, four is make it balanced.

[00:11:00]Don't use too much blur, don't use too much don't make any of the colors stand out too much. So, the easiest way to learn ricing is literally just copying someone's dot files, use it, claim it it's yours. Yeah, it's literally larping. I did that and it worked, you know, I know how to rice now. So, this video is literally just me larping and milking the hell out of the Linux penguin on my thumbnails.