+1 for Linux Academy.
I have completed 20 courses and earned two certifications on Linux Academy this year ( I was unemployed for 7 months and used part of the severance money for training ).
+1 for Dark Net Diaries. Jack is a master story-teller.
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I only discovered linux this year, so for me it is just linux itself. Wish I had more time to dedicate to it but I’m enjoying just learning linux and also python.
For the new year I’d like to learn some bash scripting and messing around with dot files, the amount of customisation you can do on linux is amazing and I’d really like to take advantage of it in the new year.
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I have 3 others to mention that seem like a permant part of my workflow now:
-
tmux, with a nice solarized theme, and I have the menubar at the top, not the bottom. Hey, the different tmux"windows", are mouse-double-clickable!! So now they are like clickable tabs to me.
-
tilix
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wormhole. (sudo snap install wormhole. This replaces scp, which is deprecated and insecure).
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Strange one, but the biggest boon to my work has been to invest more heavily in my terminal experience.
- Better terminal emulator (Kitty but alacritty, et al. are good too)
- Better fonts (Fira Code–ligatures!!!–is my current choice)
- Bigger font sizes (even with great eye sight boy-howdy does it help when staring at a screen for extended periods of time)
- Customized Tmux and Vim configs to play nicely with one another
- Spending the time to figure out how to use container and virtual machine orchestrating scripts
I’ve always been a terminal user, but I never spent the time customizing, creating macros/snippets, etc. because I figured I’d end up SSH’d into a server somewhere where I couldn’t rely on having a custom config. Using containers, vagrant to orchestrate VMs and whatever other dark magic is available to work locally and have the robots deploy has made this year particularly productive.
I could go on and on, but I can guess without a doubt that these tools will be available on any distro and then I can enjoy a DE/Distro for what it is and not give myself the excuse that a hop will fix my frustrations.
@esbeeb wormhole and zstd are ace 
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I have finally discovered Ansible. I knew it was there, but had never really looked into it. It’s an agentless tool that has thousands of modules to perform operations on remote workstations. Rather than writing a script performing the steps to get something done, Ansible playbooks describe the end state. For example, install the latest version of http server, or fetch a log file from a remote server.
It’s also idempotent, which means if a condition is already true, Ansible won’t change anything. This means you can run it against a workstation multiple times, and it doesn’t make any changes if the end state already is present.
It can also control Microsoft OS using PowerShell and winrm.
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@esbeeb Maybe I’ve been living under a rock but I didn’t realise scp was actually deprecated, I hadn’t heard of wormhole but a quick read of the docs sounds quite exciting for file sharing situations. Thanks 
@daid.paige I know exactly what you mean, I regularly ansible all day and it’s awesome to write a playbook and use it to get a load of servers in line where otherwise it would have taken hours in the old days. “Kinda makes you feel like God” (sorry couldn’t help the reference because the name Daid reminded me of Hackers 
).
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@ak2020 I’ll second these for sure.
To me the second half of 2018 was just coming to grips with the switch back to Gnome (there are reasons I always run stock Ubuntu, generally interims). Most of 2019 I have just been enjoying how well Gnome works for me and my workflow though I sure do miss the HUD. I have also recently started using Boxes and really appreciate the work that went in to this amazingly easy, powerful, and useful tool.
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