New To Linux? Learn The Jargon!

are you a new to linux user or are you thinking about switching from windows or mac over to linux if you are you may be confused about some of the terms that we the linux community sometimes use when we speak so today what i wanted to do is i wanted to define a few things i want to define some of the terms that we often use that i know are confusing to new users so today we're going to focus on learning a little bit of the linux jargon i think the first term that we need to define is gnu slash linux which is technically the name of our operating system many people just shorten that to linux you know they they say linux is the operating system that's not entirely the case actually the name of the operating system is gnu slash linux because that really signifies exactly what we're dealing with here let's start with what linux is linux is actually just the kernel of the operating system every operating system at the heart of it has a kernel and on the gnu linux operating system our kernel is the linux kernel created in 1991 by linus torvalds i don't want to get too technical into what the kernel is but you can't have an operating system without it again it's that that heart the core of the operating system it manages all of your systems hardware also manages all the programs on your system it's what really powers a lot of your peripheral devices it has a lot of drivers built into it for things like certain graphics cards wi-fi chips and things like that so the kernel is the most important part of the operating system again it because it sits at the center of everything now around the kernel sits the user land programs and those programs most of them are written from the gnu project the gnu project started in 1983 well before the linux kernel was created and they set out to create their own operating system that they were going to call gnu the new operating system and they built most of the operating system they built everything they needed to have a fully functional operating system except they never completed a kernel and then in 1991 linus torvald shows up and he writes his kernel and it's ready for for use and the gnu project essentially made the gnu user land to be able to work with the linux kernel thus the birth of good news linux the operating system that we all use today that many people for convenience simply call linux i think the best way to define good new to the new linux user is at the command line or in a terminal many of the basic shill commands that you enter in a terminal if once you start learning the basic terminal commands most of those programs were actually written by the canoe project they're part of what we call the gnu core utilities so i think the next thing we should define is distro flavor and spin because when we're talking about various linux distributions you'll hear people use all three of these terms they'll talk about this linux distribution or this linux flavor or this linux spin what does that mean let's start with distro distro is simply a shortened form of distribution so it's a linux distribution what does that mean well we talked about what the linux kernel is it's the core it's the heart of the operating system and pretty much every linux distribution at the heart of it sits the same linux kernel there's some different linux kernels out there that have extra modules or modules removed but for the most part every linux distribution at the heart of it has that same linux kernel same kind of hardware support and everything up underneath it so what makes a linux distribution unique it's what you put on top of it right it's it's how you dress it up it's the clothes that that linux distribution wears so if i want to create my own linux distribution you know i'll put my favorite suite of applications on it my favorite desktop environment my wallpapers and themes and things like that and i'll dress it up and then i'll call it you know dt's linux distribution and that's what that is that's what a distro is so when you go to distrowatch.com you'll see hundreds of linux distributions these are all the various linux variants out there essentially now when people talk about flavors they're usually talking about uh a distribution based on another distribution like when we talk about kubuntu which is ubuntu's kde flavor right that's what we're talking about it's a linux distribution kubuntu is a linux distribution but kubuntu is also an ubuntu flavor if that makes sense it's based off of ubuntu is essentially what that term means some people will also interchangeably use spin for flavor so when people talk about this is an ubuntu spin or this is an arch spin meaning it's somebody that created a distribution based on ubuntu or arch it seems that typically when people talk about flavors and spins they're talking about a distribution that really doesn't differentiate itself that much from its parent distribution other than the desktop environment let me give you an example so let me switch to my desktop this is manjaro's kde plasma edition with the kde plasma desktop environment now this is manjaro their gnome edition with the gnome desktop environment you can say that this is manjaro's gnome flavor right and the previous one i showed you was manjaro's kde flavor so spin flavor they're essentially the same as distro it's just typically they're specifically talking about being based on a specific parent distribution another group of terms that's really confusing is various terms that refer to user interfaces so a user interface is the environment on your computer that you how you interact with that computer for example going back to manjaro's kde plasma what i'm in right now is a gui gui a graphical user interface meaning everything here is a graphical program right so this is not just an empty command line where you know we're not in a shell right this is a graphical environment with web browsers and file managers and text editors and things like that and i've got menu systems and you you could think of a gui a graphical environment being the opposite of a command line interface cli a cli would be something like well let me show you the cli so let me log in here this is i'm still on manjaro but now i've dropped into the command line interface the cli so i think it's obvious what the difference here is the command line interface for those of you coming from like a windows environment you can think of it as if i'm sitting at a black screen and it looks like i'm essentially at a dos prompt right i'm in the cli i'm in the command line interface and if i'm staring at a graphical environment something that looks similar to like your desktop on something like windows or mac that is a graphical user interface a gui another related term you may hear is 2etui for terminal user interface and many people get 2e confused with cli but a 2e interface is a program that runs in the terminal but it's not a command line interface program so if i run htop htop is a 2e right this is a terminal user interface it's not a command line program a command line program let me quit out of h top is something that actually runs at the command line and gives output at the command line like ls the standard list command it's going to list the files and directories in the directory i'm currently in that is a command line program that's obvious what that is where something like vim all right even though i launch it at the command line from the terminal right vim is a text editor you know we're no longer in the command line until i quit out of them then i get back into the command line so vim h-top you know those kinds of programs they're actually tui interfaces terminal user interface now let's talk about x11 xorg and wayland because anytime you see people like me talk about linux distributions you'll hear us bring up those particular terms x11 xorg weyland what are those what are those programs what do they mean x11 and xorg are essentially the same thing people will use those terms interchangeably but really the name of the program we're talking about is x11 it was built by a foundation called x.org that's why many people just use xorg and x11 interchangeably but what that is that is the display server on linux and most unix like operating systems it's been around since the late 1980s so it's been around forever and typically when you see someone in a graphical user environment on linux x11 is actually serving that so if i go back to manjaro kde we're using xorg xorgis the display server right without it all of this graphical goodness that's staring back at me would not be here without xorg all you would have is the command prompt right the cli the command line interface this is if you booted a linux system that didn't have x11 installed the display server installed all you're going to get is command prompt right all you're going to get is the cli you install a program actually it's a whole suite of programs x11 which is the display server that allows you to have a graphical environment so that's x11 or sometimes referred to as xorg now you will also hear people talk about weyland wayland is a new modern display server that's designed to eventually replace xorg it's not quite ready yet you will see some distributions shipping wayland as the default display server typically they'll also have x11 available on the system as well if you need it for a fallback now let's define terminal and shield because a lot of new to linux users really seem to be confused about the difference between what a terminal is and what the shell is so let me just show you the difference between a terminal and a shell so let me go ahead and open a terminal here in manjaro so this is the terminal the terminal is just a program that you can run programs at the command line in so the terminal allows you to run various programs within it including shells and that's the difference there are many different shells on linux the default system shield on most linux systems is a shell called bash let me just type bash and hit enter to switch over to the bash shell because by default manjaro uses the z shell by default so i switched over to bash and let me just start typing the name of a program like fish which is the name of another shell i don't know if fish is installed or not i type it and i hit enter and bash gives me a warning the bash shell is a program and it's letting me know hey fish that command is not found it's not a part of bash it's not a part of the suite of programs that's installed on this system now to show you the difference between the bash shell and the z shield just a minor difference let me exit and get back into zsh here and now let me type fish so i type f i s h now that word is red now if i type ls that word is green meaning ls is actually a command i can run but the z shell you know one of the differences with it is it's interactive and it gives you a little bit more information like hey this command that you're beginning to type that's not a real command so i don't even have to enter right but i don't even need an error message i already know that phish is not available here so your terminal is your terminal window right the program here and then your shells are basically the command line environment that you do stuff in so your shell actually has to run inside a terminal i know a lot of new users imagine that the the shell and the terminal are the same thing but i think a lot of them don't realize there's actually dozens of shills out there available on linux but by far the most common one that most linux distributions use is called the bash shell bash is a shield that was written by the gnu project and because we run good news linux bash typically is that default shell and two more terms that i want to briefly define for you guys are binaries and source so when we talk about binaries and source let me actually switch over to my main production machine let me launch a terminal and let me zoom way in i'm going to cd into well if i can type correctly slash user slash bin so as the name implies slash user slash bin this is where all the binaries on your computer should live so when you install any software from your linux distributions package manager or its software center this is where the executable binary executable means it can run right it's a actual program that can be run this is where those programs get installed and slash user slash bin now the difference between a binary and then source building from source is that a source built package means you actually have to build it yourself from source it has to compile compilation times can sometimes be really lengthy right it can take a long time to compile software so most linux distributions just shipped these pre-built binaries they've already been built on a server that the linux distribution has running right it builds a binary and then just ships you that binary when you install those packages that way you don't have to compile it yourself and that's again it saves you a lot of time if i cd into a directory where i have a some source code that i can compile i can actually show you how compiling a piece of software works i'm going to cd into this particular directory this has the source code for dwm the dynamic window manager and it is not a pre-built binary you see all these files this is the source code right all these files and to make the binary on linux typically for most programs what you do is you have to run three different commands you have to run a configure and then after configure you run make and then after make you run sudo make install so three different commands now this particular program it only requires one command to actually compile it it's just the sudo make install let me go ahead and run this and you see i get some output it's letting me know it's taking all of that source code packaging and building the binary and it places that binary actually in slash user slash bin so if i cd back into slash user slash bin and do a ls and let's grip meaning search for dwm and you can see there is the binary i just created for dwm by building it from source now that particular program is a really small program so it didn't take very long at all to build it from source but many programs take forever to build from source we talked about the x11 display server the thing that actually gives you a graphical display on linux that thing can take a long time to compile your web browsers or massive programs they can take hours to compile if you had to compile it yourself from source thankfully most linux distributions build it on their own servers and they make that pre-built binary for you and then when you install firefox for example you're actually just getting a binary from them you're not getting all the source code and then having to run through the compilation yourself and that makes things a lot easier but there are some distributions that do force you to compile a lot of your software they're not common but there are distributions out there so when we talk about source-based distributions that's what we're talking about building stuff from source when we talk about binary based distributions which is most of them we're talking about distributions that just ship these pre-built binaries for you so that's all i wanted to cover today again if you're new to linux user i know some of these terms can be confusing you probably have never heard of most of these terms and i hope me defining some of this stuff will help your transition from windows or mac over to linux a little easier now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode devin gabe james matt michael mitchell paul scott west allen chuck commander angry dog yokai dylan george lee linux ninja maxum mike eryan alexander a piece of art and for door polytechnic red prophet stephen and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode would not have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm just sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work you want to see more videos about linux and free and open source software please support me subscribe to distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace