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What is a painless way for a non-Unix programmer to get started learning Unix or GNU/Linux?

4th October 2010

My answer to What is a painless way for a non-Unix programmer to get started learning Unix or GNU/Linux? on Quora

I’d suggest getting yourself an Ubuntu virtual machine running on your own laptop—VirtualBox is free, so that’s a good starting point. That way you can play with Linux all you like without fear of breaking anything, since you can always delete the image or roll back to a snapshot.