@selea I found it helpful myself to have a good understanding of the different philosophies that underpin Linux and GNU. Especially the technical consequences for each of them. Whereas Linux regards userspace binary compatibility as holy, in GNU land it's much more "why don't you just recompile?" as the assumption is one would typically have source code.

Being aware of the different mindsets helps a lot to understand different rationales around each component. And I can appreciate both.

@selea

Huh. I lived some of that history.

* Ken Thompson et al develop Unix at AT&T "without institutional support" (1978)
* The source code escapes.
* BSD is developed from it by hippies in Berkeley
* Stallman invents anarchy license
* Some crazy guy in Finland writes a viable kernel while Stallman's back is turned
* SCO Group tries and fails to gain control of Linux. CEO dies in obscurity
* Ruthless corporate interests continue to attempt control and exploitation with limited success.

@selea I think one important aspect that is often overlooked is that Linux success came mostly through BSD being tied up in litigations. Early on it was just an idea that people liked but it rapidly began to stand on it own two legs so to speak.

Could also mention a few of the early major players like Debian, SuSE, Redhat, Gnome, KDE, gnu and how they all (together with 100s of volounteers) made linux into the system we see today.

@selea If its got stuff about installing the OS then I would make sure to put in fixing common pain points with the process (drivers for wireless cards + nvidia gpus, finding specific fixes for your hardware, setting windows to work with a utc hardware clock if doing a dualboot)

also maybe have a brief list of machines that you shouldnt attempt to install linux on if you can get a short list of commonly-owned machines that can easily get permanent damage from attempting a linux install (ive heard an anecdote of an attempted ubuntu install permanently frying all the usb-a ports on a laptop. iirc it was a blue asus zenbook, which doesnt narrow it down since there are multiple asus zenbooks that are blue, but that line is rather popular so if you can find discussions of this consistently happening to a lot of people then maybe include it. as an example with actual evidence of it happening to more than one person: samsung (iirc) laptops could get bricked by the uefi variable space overfilling and they didnt have a check to prevent this).

you could also do some examples of hardware that works well with linux (both full machines like thinkpads and components e.g. amd and intel graphics cards, intel wireless cards) and machines with linux preinstalled (do dell still provide this option? valves hardware, and smaller vendors like system76, starlabs, etc)