IMO, the best way to get comfortable with Linux is to get comfortable with the command line, because although every distribution is going to have different UI and built-in apps, the command line is going to stay pretty consistent. Also, a lot of troubleshooting you Google is going to involve interacting with the command line, and it's essential to understand what the commands you're executing are actually doing.
I'd recommend The Linux Command Line by William Schotts to get started.
Was trying to configure a network bridge for a vm just the other day from cli. The guide (for Ubuntu which I was also using) was using nmcli (Network Manager), tried it and command not found, back to searching and was nudged to systemd networking by stackoverflow which didnt work either. Turns out that my system was using Netplan. Three different systems to handle networking, really? Ok, chatgpt convert this nmcli command to netplan, sure here you go just put this in your netplan config file and apply config. Ends up with a botched network config on a headless system.
netplan(.io) is an abstraction layer on top of either NetworkManager (GUI installs) or systemd-networkd (servers/non-GUI) and is not really needed except as a convenience for Canonical's own designs for automated mass deployments especially linked to cloud-init. Under the hood it just converts its YAML configuration files into the syntax for the underlying actual network management tool.
For NetworkManager it'll write the config file to /run/NetworkManager/system-connections/ and for networkd to /run/systemd/network/ on EVERY boot since /run/ is a tmpfs (file-system in RAM).
For almost all servers, and most workstations, netplan is an unnecessary indirection since most hosts (including containers) have pretty static network configurations that only require writing once (to /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ or /etc/systemd/network/ ).
nmcli is the NetworkManager command-line tool. There is also nmtui for a text user interface. These are terminal alternatives to the GUI applets such as nm-applet (network-manager-gnome) or plasma-nm for KDE.
networkctl is the CLI interface to systemd-networkd. There is no widely used GUI interface to it (yet).
That's the exact experience I went through about a year ago trying to set up a bridged VM on a headless Ubuntu system. I mean right down to the sequence of nmcli, systemd, and Netplan, winding up with wiping it all away and just running Virtual Box on a way overpowered and mostly idle Win 10 system. Because I just wanted to run a VM connected to my local LAN.
Linux networking and DNS resolution, while working fine for the happy path, are a dumpster fire from a system management viewpoint. Especially if you want to do anything even mildly off-script. And I say this as a Linux user since before the kernel hit 1.0.
I don't know, maybe it's just a documentation problem. The accumulated junk of 50 years of obsolete documentation that you have to wade through to find out that the whiz-bang Linux distro you're using today is not the Linux which worked fine last year.
And that right there is why Linux is so frustrating to start with. It is easier to solve most problems via command line however a normal user should never ever have to touch a command line. Everything for a common person should be easily accessible via a gui.
> Everything for a common person should be easily accessible via a gui.
They are. Just there are many different GUIs. Each distro by definition has different ones and you can easily change them yourself etc.
There are dozens of sound GUIs, hell, I've tried 4 redshift GUIs before settling on QRedshift. It's so easy to write software for Linux that you have countless opportunities. That's why the command line is easier - it always works(ish).
> who got to decide what is extremist or as the study also put it "alternative"?
That's explained in the paper:
> Our list of extremist channels consists of those labeled as white identitarian by Ledwich and Zaitsev (26) (30 channels), white supremacist by Charles (45) (23 channels), alt-right by Ribeiro et al. (24) (37 channels), extremist or hateful by the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (16 channels), and those compiled by journalist Aaron Sankin from lists curated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the Counter Extremism Project, and the white supremacist website Stormfront (157 channels) (46).
Unfortunately I'm not surprised. The SPLC are the Fox News of declaring everyone they don't like hate groups, and the ADL do a lot of the same, in addition to finding excuses for actual hate when it's the types they like
I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham, but I haven't seen anyone explain why or give examples, and in my experience they've been reliable.
Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech and not a hate group while easily listing any other organization that opposes their political views as hate groups.
If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
> Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech
Yeah, its always easiest to just make up an example that never happened. SPLC didn't defend Antifa as just wrongheaded.
It just doesn’t designate them a hate group because they, whatever else they might be, aren’t about the kind of discrimination that SPLC uses to define a hate group (nor, despite sometimes being at odds with government, are they centered on the kind of anti-government ideology that SPLC defines its catalog of anti-government extremist groups with.)
Ironically, what SPLC is beinf criticized for with Antifa is actually having specific meanings for its designations rather than arbitrarily applying them to everyone it disagrees with.
> If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
The SPLC does not now, and never has, claimed to be a force of generic moderation fighting generic “extremism”; its mission has always been to fight for racial justice and specifically against white supremacy. (It has since 1990 tracked hate groups and antigovernment extremist groups, two sets which overlap and which it has observed are influential in the issues it fights against, but the definitions used and purposes of that have always been, quite openly, shaped by and in service to it's primary mission, not orthogonal to it.)
And, having said that, they do include in their catalogs grouos meeting their definition that purport to be aligned against the same things as SPLC, like the New Black Panther Party (which is both listed by them as an “anti-government extremist” group and a “designated hate group” by SPLC.)
> I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham
Hate groups have been saying it the whole time the SPLC has been around (and especially since it started tracking hate groups, but even when it was just doing pro-civik-rights legal work for 20 years before that) and the US has lots of hate groups.
Its become more current in the broader American Right as quiet-part-out-loud groups have moved from the margins since Trump became a leading figure.
ADL and SPLC are not serious organizations. They're closer to circus shows. The rest reek of DC think-tank elitism and I'm unsure why I should care about their opinions.
Parents who do not want their children to be indoctrinated by "gender ideologues" were labelled as "domestic terrorists" by the Attorney General [1] so the term does not seem to mean what most people think it does.
Having said that Antifa comes to mind as do a number of similar groups, past and present. As to whether you call these "communist" or not does not really matter as political terminology is intentionally vague - anything to the right of a "progressive" soon becomes "extreme-right/fascist/nazi/...", anything to the left of a "hard-line conservative" soon becomes "communist/socialist/anarchist/...".
So yes, there is plenty of violence on the left side of the political spectrum, probably more than there is on the right side of the spectrum. Take e.g. the 2020 BLM riots as an example for what this looks like. The media tends to tone down their reporting when it comes to the former which lead to terms like "fiery bur mostly peaceful protests" [2,3] while exaggerating the latter but the facts speak for themselves.
Violence is violence no matter whether it comes from the right, the centre of the left. A rock thrown by a Muslim does as much damage as one thrown by an atheist or a flag-waving "patriot".
Yeah, you're right that it's "the amygdala". I got confused by the plural. It's complicated. As Wikipedia says, "amygdala" is the singular for "amygdalae", but both of these words are said to be Latin. Wikipedia correctly traces them to the original Greek "αμυγδαλή", which is a female noun, hence its transliteration as "amygdala" in Latin, rather than "amygdale" as it should be if it came directly from Greek; I think that's because it's ungrammatical to have a female noun ending in "-e" in Latin (I am unsure, since I'm not a Latin-speaker). To confuse matters further, "amygdalae" is correct as the plural of both the Latin "amygdala" and the Greek "amygdale" ("αμυγδαλή - αμυγδαλαί"). Of course, "αμυγδαλή" itself is derived from "αμύγδαλον".
In any case, it may be easy to see what is meant by "amygdalas" but it is not right. "Amygdalae" is the right form of the word, whether you want to take it from Latin, Greek, or, indeed, English.
Btw, there is a lot of confusion about what is Latin and what is Greek. Both languages are used for scientific terminology (for reasons unknown, this habbit has persisted in modern times) but Latin words often borrow from Greek, but keep their Latin endings... which are often similar to the Greek ones. So it's hard to know which is which. I used to resolve this kind of confusion by perusing a good etymological lexicon of Ancient Greek, but unfortunately this was taken from me in a flood and I can only now rely on the internet, and my native knowledge of Greek.
> In any case, it may be easy to see what is meant by "amygdalas" but it is not right. "Amygdalae" is the right form of the word, whether you want to take it from Latin, Greek, or, indeed, English.
If you take a foreign word from (say) Latin and use it in English, you also do not use Latin declension forms of it, so why use Latin plural form of it? I think it makes more sense to form plural using English grammar rules.
I think the point is that those are not loans into English, rather they are international scientific terms in terminology that is used by many people whose first language is neither English, nor Latin (or Greek). So there is no reason to have a convention that is specific to English, or any other language, besides the Greek or Latin of the original.
In essence, when you use a word like "amygdala", you are not using English. Rather, you are code-switching between Latin and English.
I'd recommend The Linux Command Line by William Schotts to get started.