What is a painless way for a non-Unix programmer to get started learning Unix or GNU/Linux?
4th October 2010
My answer to What is a painless way for a non-Unix programmer to get started learning Unix or GNU/Linux? on Quora
I’d suggest getting yourself an Ubuntu virtual machine running on your own laptop—VirtualBox is free, so that’s a good starting point. That way you can play with Linux all you like without fear of breaking anything, since you can always delete the image or roll back to a snapshot.
More recent articles
- LLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends - 8th January 2026
- Introducing gisthost.github.io - 1st January 2026
- 2025: The year in LLMs - 31st December 2025