I’m a good chemist, but not IT advanced. Started using Debian out of the box last year on miniPC. Running Jellyfin only on that local machine. Don’t understand coding, but copy/ paste terminal instructions from trusted sites. Have 1TB music, films and documents. Want to move all photos from Google.
Small advice, document everything.
You know what, I’ve been the guy that didnt in the past. Your reminder is spot on
With computer stuff, you can do even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
TL;DR: your documentation and your shell script (sequence of console commands you run to accomplish the task) can be the same file.
(Dunno what kind of chemistry you do, but you may have already come across this concept in the form of Jupyter notebooks or something like that.)
While I’m at it, I’d also like to mention Ansible and Git, for when you really want to keep good records and have a reproducible setup. Don’t worry about them immediately as it’s probably too overwhelming to learn all at once, but keep 'em in the back of your mind for later.
I would like to reiterate the importance of taking notes. As a younger man, I never felt the need thinking, ‘I can remember all that’. Wrong! So as a elderly man, taking profuse notes is paramount. So it’s a good idea to get in the practice of taking notes while you are young.
I use NotePad++ locally, then transfer the notes to an encrypted Obsidian vault on my server. I can actually stand up a server, implement all the security necessary, install 30 or so apps, and be in production within hours just from notes. They house all my Docker compose files and everything. So it’s kind of like painting by numbers.
Get in the habit of taking notes and refine them as well, as you galong.
Preferably in an easy, maintainable way. Like markdown in a git repo.