Next Steps

There are tons of userspace applications. It would be impossible to know of all of them.

Many userspace applications were presented in this class really everything introduced, with the exception of the filesystem are technically userspace applications.

Researching and practicing are the ways you can learn and become comfortable with userspace applications.

GNU offers many free, open source packages most of which are userspace applications.

Not everything in this class was a GNU package. We also used other software from different organizations. Many of the chapters of this book contain a Next Steps article pointing you towards official documentation.

vimtutor

The vim package comes with a package called vimtutor which is an interactive tool for advancing your vim skills.

Finding Additional Userspace Applications

There is no manifest of all possible userspace applications. So you have to discover them on your own.

Strategies for discovering additional software:

  • Talk to other technologists
    • what tools do they use on the job?
    • what tools have they heard of that they want to learn?
    • what tools are they actively learning?
    • what are the purposes of those tools?
    • what are unique problems they had to solve using various tools?
  • Join technologist communities
    • local meetups
    • online meetups
    • social media tech groups
  • Subscribe to mailing lists or RSS feeds
  • Attend Tech conferences
  • Research alternatives to tools you already know
    • Web Servers: this class introduced NGINX and Caddy, research alternatives
    • Task scheduling: this class introduced cron, research alternatives
    • Service creation and management: this class introduced systemd, research alternatives
    • Package Manager: this class introduced apt, research alternatives