Absolute must know knowledge for new Linux users

While it is fun to try out many Linux distributions. It is paramount to know what you can already do with your existing distribution. In this post, I want to share some of the most important Linux knowledge that will help you in bad times with Linux.

All Linux distributions can be recovered from most Failures

Sometimes, you may install or remove packages that may ask you to accept some suggestion. If that suggestion somehow leads to removing critical packages (e.g. Say bluetooth driver or Network Driver) it can remove your internet packages, GUI and other essential packages that is required to even boot your Operating System. That's why it is critical to keep one installation media all the time. You can install a software called Ventoy. It let's you boot from any Linux live media and lets you enter your old installation environment (i.e, your broken installation space). Once you setup the internet, you will be able to reinstall any packages that caused the breakage. E.g. In systems like Arch Linux or Cachy OS, the live environment lets you enter your installation space with a technique called chroot. E.g. Arch and its derivatives provide a command called arch-chroot, that lets you get to your media without additional setup. For Ubuntu and its derivative, the process may be more involved, but it is not worse than having to re-install the whole distribution, reset all your files, configuration and what not. Just search for "chroot <your_distribution_name>" and you should be able to learn about the environment.

You can change everything in a Linux distribution

If a package or environment is available in another distribution, you can setup same environment in what ever distribution you are currently using. E.g. You don't need to install Arch to use Hyprland. You can infact, install more than one Desktop environment at the same time on most popular Linux distributions. E.g. I usually use Hyprland and KDE, and use any one of them based on how I want to work. If I have a keyboard centric work, I may switch to Hyrpland, else I may just use KDE.

You can use Timeshift to fix most distribution issues

What's better than a broken Linux OS ? An unbroken Linux OS. That is exactly what you can do with a software called Timeshift. This is one software, that you should install and setup immediately after installing your Linux OS. This software can backup your installation files (make sure to setup in a separate backup partition or better separate drive). Once I install and run Timeshift for the first time, I set it up to run weekly and keep just 2 backups. After that you can just forget about this tool.

If your Linux distribution, somehow becomes unbootable, you can again boot a live usb, install Timeshift on that live environment and use it to restore your previous installation. Use the github link to learn about restore or watch some youtube videos to learn about backup and restore

Backing up data is easy

We used Timeshift to backup your system files, but for your data, it's a good idea to backup them as well. I usually backup my Documents folder to at least another drive in my computer (two different SSDs). You can use a software called "Rsync". In fact one of the backup options in Timeshift was Rsync. This software can create backup with only the new things that changed. Just note, here I am not creating snapshots like in Timeshift, because I can use Git (locally) to manage projects that change constantly. I am only creating one more copy of my important folders. For incremental backup, use Git (and you can backup these folders as part of your backup). Once you install Rsync, use following command to backup any directory.

$ rsync -qa ~/Documents/ /mnt/Extra/MyFileBackup/

Here I am backing up my Documents folder into another folder (which is in a separate partition).