I’ve been doing the OverTheWire Bandit over the past couple of days and have become stuck on the earlier levels. I deem this very embarrassing as this is supposed to be an “easy” and “recommended for beginners” type of puzzle that requires hands on understanding of the Linux terminal. But I have been using Linux for 9 months now, I wouldn’t do the most complicated things (other than break my whole os) only the things required to make my overall user experience somewhat enjoyable. Now this makes me very sad to come to the conclusions that I may be below the average Linux beginner which I didn’t know was possible according to my knowledge. I am only asking of tips and tricks to these puzzles and maybe to positive reinforcement to make feel better about myself. Now I will not tolerate spoilers as in the official rules of OverTheWire clearly states, and I hope you will follow this rule for the better sake of my learning and understanding of the Linux terminal ( and for the sake of the game itself)
But unfortunately a fair amount of smaller projects do use it as a download site.
And I get it, not everyone has the time or budget to make a website for their own little passion projects, and it’s probably not even worth it for a lot of them given their limited audience. I’m not gonna say that every little tool to make my computer do some goofy thing that only me and about 6 other people care about (and 3 of those people are the people actively developing it) needs to have its own website.
But I feel like a lot of projects could benefit from throwing a “If you’re not here for the code and just want to download and run the program click here” message at the top of their page
Also, this is neither here nor there, but as something of a Linux noob, I’d kind of appreciate it Linux installation instructions included some brief explanations of what the commands they’re having you type into the terminal do. Sure, sometimes it’s as simple as “sudo apt-get install program” and you’re off to the races, but other times it’s a multi-step process of transcribing magic spells into the scary black & white hacker window.
And as someone who’s decent with computers and trying to learn more I don’t mind doing a little research to figure out what I’m actually doing. But for your average computer user who wants things to just work, I think that’s a bigger stumbling block to people giving Linux a fair shake than a lot of programmer types think it is. A tiny bit of handholding can go a long way.
yeah i mostly agree. it’s not that much more work to make it available directly in the software store through flatpak. this thing of developers making their software and not even bothering to even build it on linux must end right now.
that said windows users will still get their .exe files from github. sorry, no better alternatives for them.
I generally agree with you that the projects could be more accessible. I also believe that these projects exist to do one thing, which is create a solution to a problem and share it with others.
As for your learning and explaining what the various bash command chains do: Explaining bash commands is actually one of the few things I would say AI (especially local/self-hosted LLMs) are REALLY good at.
There are lots of obscure options for every bash command, and having used a lot of LLMs for work, most LLM models can use and explain these bash commands, piping, and exit conditions quite well.
Not everyone wants to use AI, which I can understand. But, if you’re going to use AI, use it to break down more complex things and explain them to you.
Installation instructions are often terse with a bunch of assumed knowledge left implicit.
It becomes a sidequest needing an investment of an unknown amount of time with no guarantee that you’ll have a working program at the end of it.
Man pages can be just as bad, like the developer was ticking a box.