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
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026