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Wanting to improve my Linux skills after 17 months of daily driving Linux

I've been daily driving Linux for 17 months now (currently on Linux Mint). I have got very comfortable with basic commands and many just works distros (such as Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS) with apt as the package manager. I've tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could never get wifi to work, which made it difficult to install properly. I've used it on my daily driver laptop, but ran into some issues. I thought a more advanced distro, that is still stable, would be good overall. However, not getting new software for a long time sounds quite annoying.

I'm wanting to challenge myself to get much better with Linux, partitioning, CLI, CLI tools, understanding the components of my system, trying tiling window managers, etc. I've been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general? I always hear good things about the Arch Wiki. Is there any other tips someone can give me, to sharpen my Linux skills? I was even considering trying out Gentoo on my X220, but the compiling times sound painful. I wouldn't daily drive Gentoo or Arch, just yet, but I would try to use them as much as possible for general use.

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  • I thought a more advanced distro, that is still stable, would be good overall. However, not getting new software for a long time sounds quite annoying.

    Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It's pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues. It gives you the benefits that you can basically find any package in the AUR and everything is up-to-date. Try it out, if you don't like it, you can still switch to something else.

    I’m wanting to challenge myself to get much better with Linux, partitioning, CLI, CLI tools

    The best way to learn the CLI is to use it. Try not to use your graphical file manager for a while and only interact with the file system through the terminal, that teaches you a lot.

    I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general?

    Yes.

    I always hear good things about the Arch Wiki.

    It is truly fantastic.

    Is there any other tips someone can give me, to sharpen my Linux skills?

    Use the system, don't be shy, try different things out. If you are scared that you might break something, try it out in a VM. Break your VM and try to fix it. That teaches you a lot.

    I was even considering trying out Gentoo on my X220, but the compiling times sound painful.

    I would not recommend that, updating packages will take ages, it's not a great experience.

    • Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It's pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues.

      Not even just nowadays. My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install. It's so old, it not only predates the installer, it predates the "traditional" way and used the old TUI installer. It even predates the sysvinit to systemd switch! The physical computer has been ship of thesis'd twice.

      Arch is surprisingly reliable. It's not "stable" as in things change and you have to update some configs or even your own software. But it's been so reliable I never even felt the need to go look elsewhere. It just works.

      Even my Arch servers have been considerably more reliable and maintenance-free than the thousands I manage at work with lolbuntu on them. Arch does so little on its own, there's less to go wrong. Meanwhile the work boxes can't even update GRUB noninteractively, every now and then we have a grub update that pops a debconf screen and hangs unattended-upgrades until manually fixed and hoses up apt as a whole.

    • Thanks for this, I think I will give Arch Linux a go, and avoid GUI file management. My plan is to daily drive my X220 for more lightweight tasks as it's a nice laptop to use. So using Arch on it may just force me to have to use Arch as a daily driver if I want to use a nice laptop keyboard.

      • Another thing that helped me: Get comfortable in the Terminal. Obviously you have to learn some commands and how they work, but just configure your shell and commonly used CLI tools. It makes the experience so much more pleasant. Install a nice shell prompt, set up some aliases for frequently used commands, learn the basics of shell scripting and write your own useful little scripts for things you often have to do, maybe start using Vim and configure it the way you like it. Also explore other shells. Bash is the default shell, but there are better options like zsh or fish. You can watch this video to get some inspiration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KKxhf50FIPI. This is actually pretty close to my shell setup. If you want to start customizing bash, check this out: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3W7Ky_aaaY.

        To continue learning, maybe subscribe to some Linux-oriented YouTube channels. DistroTube makes great videos about Linux, tiling window managers, how to use various commands, how to configure your shell environment, etc. He also reviews many Linux distros or explains why free software is important. If you search any Linux-related topic on YouTube, chances are that DT already made a great video about it.

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