Two kinds of nerds: the read the manuals, follow the instructions folks… and then my people, the plug it in turn it on push the button first crew. :)

In the old days, we would ls /usr/bin/ (sic, there are several locations defined for apps) and either look at the man page (if it existed) for the items we saw, or just run the commands with a --help option to figure out what they did. At best we maybe had an O’Reilly book (the ones with animals on the covers) or friends to ask. You can still do that today instead of reading blog posts or websites, just look, be curious and be willing to break something by accident. :)

Part of the Linux journey is to be inquisitive and break some stuff so you can learn to fix it - unlike say Windows, on a Unix-style system the filesystem is laid out in a very specific way (there’s a specification [1]) so one always know where “things” are - docs go here, icons go there, programs go here, configs go there… - lending itself to just poking around and seeing what something does when you run it.

After awhile your brain adjusts and starts to see all the beautiful patterns in design of the typical Linux OS/distro because it’s all laid out in a logical manner and documented how it’s supposed to work if you play the game correctly.

[1] https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml

In modern Linux and assuming you did no pre-filtering or post-processing, no. machine-id systemd is a thing, fstabs commonly use device UUIDs now snd so forth with various subsystems. A laptop GRUB config commonly has the resume UUID set (sleep/hibernation stuff), a server typically has network configs tied to the hardware IDs, and on and on…

I’ve been watching a domain name for years (15?) - it is a “funny prop from a niche movie” in the 90s that nobody even remembers and it’s length isn’t short etc., a name only a real nerd would even know (poilte cough). I’ve watched this domain pass from squatter to sqatter over the years, it doesn’t sell but keeps getting picked up as soon as it expires at the previous squatter. The dotcom domain registry system is completely broken in favour of crony capitalism.

The number of good domain names being squatted on is too damn high. They’ll never see a single one of my shiny nickels, much less a dirty old dime.