Introduction

LXUP ? Is that an exoplanet ?

It means actually two related things: LinuX setUP and Learning eXperience UPgrade

Samuel Roland, the original author of this website, started this adventure in August 2024. As a fan of productivity tools (Zoxide, Gitui, others), he started helping friends and sharing tips to use them efficiently... Sadly, spending a few hours with a friend to setup and help learn the basics, would not scale to hundreds of other students. As a consequence, many amazing tools would not spread far outside our friends circle.

During the IT Bachelor at HEIG-VD (2022-2025), he was frustrated with the official tools, heavy virtual machines, and usually slow feedback cycles. As a fan of Linux, he started documenting better ways to work on labs, and searching ways to work natively instead of using lagging VMs. He even built dedicated tools to drastically reduce manual steps in several courses.

The next challenge was to make it easy to bring the same tools and local experience on dozens of students. With the help of Linux automations (Ansible), scripts were developed for Linux (targeting Fedora and Ubuntu). After several iterations, it became as easy as a single command to run and less than five minutes to wait per course! Supporting Windows was also included via WSL. Five courses at HEIG-VD got this full native setup, even with additional tools.

LXUP community is booting...

Until July 2026, all the content was only written by Samuel Roland. Free time was only there during holidays and start of semesters. The exams period were very busy, therefore the project only got a dozen commits. The February 2026 month was the peek of progress with a total of 237 commits. In April 2026, the Git repository reached 1000 commits and contained over 150 web pages.

After a considerable personal time investment, guides of PCO, SYE, ASM, CRY, CLD, Zoxide, or Flameshot are considered to be done! While this is great, other guides like MAT2, CRY/CryptoCod, POO, BDR, and most guides of productivity tools do look more like random tips stiched together. They are still waiting someone to be completed, updated, rewritten, tested and improved.

Starting in summer 2026, the aim is to maximize the quality and impact of the work. The goal is to release all content under open-source licenses and assist external contributors to help on the project. We would love to build a growing community of people sending feedback, writing content or even changing the website itself. This contribution guide is your entrypoint to help you get started.