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.
- Find an open-source software that you’re interested in, but your main distro doesn’t provide it in the official repo. Be a packager for this software.
- Open your distro’s wiki, rewrite (or contribute, if already good enough) a page or section.
- Try the bleeding-edge version (or very-early testing) of your favourite distro, and submit some test results, regarding to your hardware.
IMHO these tasks are interesting, could learn a lot from these tasks, and other linux users could benefit from these work
I really like these suggestions, I’ve always wanted to contribute to FOSS software, but always felt underskilled. I will add this to my list of things to do to challenge my Linux and basic programming skills.
It’s worth noting that the barrier to entry as a maintainer depends on which distro you’re using at the time. It’s not uncommon for a distro to have a community repository system, like PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR for Arch, MPR for Debian, etc. I’m not very familiar with Mint, and couldn’t easily tell if it has its own or just uses PPAs from upstream.
It isn’t especially taxing on programming skills, and if you don’t pick too complex of a package, the Linux skills required shouldn’t be wildly above your level, but may push you to learn some new things by digging a bit deeper. I haven’t formally maintained public packages, but I’ve needed to build a few over my years using Linux, and it was easier than I’d expected to just build one. It may be easier than you think, too.
Thanks for the additional info. I installed Arch, it was far less daunting then I anticipated. In fact, it was prettt straightforward. I’ll look into your suggestion.
As an alternative idea…
A using a spare desktop as a headless VM server would be a good way to practice your CLI skills. Don’t install a GUI, or web admin tool, and only use SSH to admin it.
From there, setup a couple of VMs for Arch or Gentoo testing. Eventually, a Linux From Scratch attempt would provide a lot of learning opportunities.
Sounds interesting, I’ll give this project idea a go
This might be something for you https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/
Try installing Gentoo. Follow their installation instructions. I was able to install it, but failed to install a DE. So, got a console going and couldn’t go further. That was about 2 years ago. I have an extra laptop that I always install stuff on to learn.
Have you just been running without a DE for 2 years now?
That is peak GNU/Linux. Or maybe even non-GNU/Linux
God status. 😂
Nah, kept it for a while then removed it. I might give it another shot and see. Poor laptop has seen so many distros it probably hates me now.
Installing arch is a great way to learn. Also don’t be scared of daily driving it, it’s not like it breaks twice a week. More like once a year, which is better than ubuntu in my experience.
Breakage can be mitigated by root FS snapshots, e.g. with snapper.
Less than once a year for me. I don’t remember it breaking in the last few years.
“I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve.”
I use Arch and so does my wife (she has no idea). The wiki is legendary because it is well used (I’ve written a few bits myself). I’ve used Gentoo for quite a while too but you will find compilation times a bit of a bore.
I own an IT company - I am the MD. I use Arch actually! (and so does my wife)
Haha I’m stealing that. Btw I use Arch (and so does my wife)
BTW I also use Arch (and also so does my husband) 😁
You have a wife, we get it.
I drink water. So does my wife. Haha
Manual arch install was one of the best experiences I had on Linux so far. You learn so much (even more when you try to compare file systems for example to find the best one for you) from the wiki. I don’t know if I’ll be switching from it haha. I’m in the same boat as you, wanting to learn it more and more, hell I’m reading How Linux Works book haha. CLI file management is nice, but I still go back to GUI a lot cos it’s easier to drag and drop to another window instead of figuring out the path to copy to. Not gonna use it just for the sake of it lol Unless someone has tips. I’m all ears :)
Another vote for Arch. Manual Arch install was an interesting, and positive, experience. I did it multiple times so I could better understand what was actually being done. It helped me understand the boot and EFI partitions because I wanted to dual boot Windows.
For Arch itself, I’ve had a way snappier experience with pacman than apt and the AUR is a really convenient resource. So many packages there that you would otherwise have to build from source.
Bleeding edge packages can cause problems, but there are ways to recover.
downgradefrom the AUR makes downgrading packages really easy. The latest Nvidia drivers caused a bunch of problems with games for me on Wayland so I downgraded them and the Linux kernel and added them to pacman’s package ignore list.I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.
Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).
I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.
Ironically the huge packages will have best security and speed benefits when compiled yourself
I don’t think it’s that clear cut to be honest. More code doesn’t mean the package benefits more from optimizations at all, and even if that were true you might care more about the performance of the kernel or various small libraries that are used by a lot of programs as opposed to how fast some random application that depends on qt-WebKit is:
Never noticed the speed difference besides the insanely long install times. But it was a long time ago I used it, but I did learn a lot.
Try virtualization and containerization. Like Distrobox, running libvirt in one and a client in another. Or use ssh.
Harden your system, setup a secure ssh server for example
Installing Arch manually will teach you a lot of those things. Just do not use archinstall.
After installing arch following the wiki, don’t know how many times. I love arch install.
I wrote down all the CLI commands I need and just need to type them down nowadays, it’s not considerably slower than Archinstall.
Arch is pretty painless on the long run, almost everything is available when you combine AUR and official. I’ve had some package manager issues after not using my laptop for like 6 months but I believe it more a lack for arch knowledge rather than a problem for intermediate / advanced user.
What was frustrating, like in every single imperative distro it that I feel like the system isn’t clean anymore after a while and I end up reinstalling or hoping for another distro.
What I found to daily drive everything rock solid but in a funny way is NixOS, which is declarative. If you have some time and curiosity I would recommend checking how it works. No more distro hoping / installs for me
Linux Bible 10th edition. Yes, it’s for Fedora but use whatever distro you just prefer. It’ll teach everything about Linux you need to know.
Thank you
Not a joke:
Write your own device driver.
Preferably for some kind of esoteric hardware that you own but no-one else has, but it’d also be a valuable experience to do it for some commonly used piece of hardware for which good Linux drivers already exist.
For any moderately talented programmer this should be a reasonably difficult exercise, which will teach you very valuable lessons about Linux (and be quite fun at the same time).
Debugging a kernel panic is not what most people consider “fun”. Especially with a non-zero chance of bricking your machine on bare metal if you mess up somewhere. I’ve done driver development for both Windows and Linux in both hobbyist and professional capacities and it’s not a fun experience to say the least.
