Youtube video "100 what to do after a clean install of linux mint 18 cinnamon" -- good advice?

[James_Smith]

It's a video produced by a guy on youtube who seems to really know his stuff. He gets a lot of thumbs up and a lot of positive comments in the comments section.

Basically, he has you go to his github and, using terminal, download a bunch of stuff. I started doing it the other day but I aborted because it was taking a long time. And then I though "Hmmm... I wonder if this is reversable? What if it's a bunch of stuff I don't need, can't use, or is actually destructive in some way?"

I thought I'd post here to see what you guys thought.

Thanks.

P.S. It's a 37 minute long video, but you can get the gist of what he's doing by watching the first few minutes.

[MintBean]

Only watched a few minutes. Looks like it installs a lot of stuff that is down to personal preference, so it may or may not be useful to you.

[balayya]

didnt watch the video , but these might help

https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/Home

[Habitual]

who seems to really know his stuff.

James:

You'll find lots of this type of material. Most is well intentioned, but in the long run,
it comes down to simple experience. I emphatically discourage such outlets.
There is no substitute for experience.

Advice: As a learning exercise, run through it in Vbox.

running post-install scripts is a right-of-passage, IMO but even that gets "old".
What if you had 25 workstations all wanting the same exact thing?
Install, customize. #yawn

https://wiki.debian.org/Simple-CDD

[Cosmo.]

That is the trouble with videos: It is near to impossible, to simply jump back and forth. Reading is impossible. Out of this reasons mistakes are very hard to find and even harder to point at.

If you want to learn something, use something to read. Which user will after 30 minutes remember, what had been explained in the complete time, where in the video the mouse cursor jumped around, which windows got opened and why? For a newbie absolutely impossible, for an experienced user mostly a waste of half an hour of this life.

Simply assume, that the comments would have been videos also (would be somehow consequent). Hard to imagine, where the comments are pointing to. Video as a learning media has high limitations.

The author of this video claims to provide 100 tips in the given time. That makes about 3 tips per minute in the average. Which person is supposed to only remember which 100 tips this have been, not to speak about 100 times the how-to about them. Of course you can watch the video 10 times (or more), than you invested 5 hours or more. In a properly written document you find usually what you want in a few minutes.

[Penn]

You probably have enough responses to answer your question and I will just say more along the same lines but with a slightly different angle. Such as I can see a benefit from what he assembled but I'll get to that in a moment.

No, I don't think most of what this person put out there is harmful and yes what you have done can probably be undone.

I didn't watch the whole video but did download the zip from github to read the scripts. I do have a few concerns with his approach. First, he seems to be an Arch user and the type of typical Mint user seems to not be a good target for some Arch practices.

Second, that method of updating the kernel (all the scripts starting with "udate-to-the-latest-stable") isn't the way I'd recommend going for a Mint install.

Third, and this ties into him being an Arch user, I noticed he has in one of those scripts a command to install things from the Mint (Ubuntu) repos. The one that jumped out at me is "curl". That is already installed by default. This causes me to wonder how much he really knows about Mint and how much this is really meant for Mint. Well, the second causes me to wonder his knowledge of Mint since Mint's way of doing kernel upgrades is different from other distros (you will find that ability in Update Manager).

The biggest thing that makes me wonder is what others have sort of said already. Who is his target "audience"? I wouldn't recommend doing these things to a newbie and those who might benefit from what he envisions as the "ultimate" Mint probably already know how to do most of this on their own.

Where I do feel this could be a benefit is learning. Open those scripts (ending in .sh) choosing "Display" and you will see the text commands. You also see a warning to learn what you are doing but if you did learn what this script does, why do you need the script anymore once you learn it? Well I guess you could use it to do just that, learn. Learn what those commands are. Look into the programs it installs and decide if you need them. But don't just blindly run those scripts.

Just my opinion. So shortened. No, don't just run the scripts. No I don't think most will cause harm. But learn from what is in the scripts and thereby you will learn about Linux in general.