Focus learning on how to install Arch Linux and use it without breaking. This not just gives you a rock-stable distro, but also the required knowledge on to maintain Linux OS.
Or go with “Ubuntu” level of easiness. You choose. :)
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?
Oh yes, that’s exactly how I learnt. Also I have 1000+ edits in Arch Wiki, but stopped contributing to it (as well as AUR) few years ago.
What the hell is this challenge?
Am I allowed to add my printer? What about setting up my screen resolution? If I scale the fonts to match, that’s dangerously close to “customization”. Can I switch to dark theme?
I can install software, but what about shell extensions that are in my distro’s repository? That’s software, but also customization.
all of that is yes!! You can change to dark mode only, you can set up resolution, what matters is keeping the distro brand wallpaper, colors, etc, intact!! It’s to keep it simple.
Oh, it’s you again.
Well then I’ve been doing your challenge on most of my systems for the past 15 years.
I mostly just install Debian with Gnome, the programs I need, and then get on with my life.
If you’re going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).
Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5’s UX the main reason I didn’t like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn’t do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.
It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn’t know how (and still don’t even now).
If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.
And for the record I don’t like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.
If you don’t mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.
Pacman (Arch’s package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there’s the AUR on top.
Also while I’ve never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier
It’s easier to think about Linux on the context of what an individual application needs to run. Pretty much everything you do will have these components.
configuration
an executable
a communication mechanism (dbus, networking, web server, etc)
something that decides if the application runs or not (systemd, monit, docker/docker compose, kubernetes scheduler, or you as the user)
a way of accepting input (keyboard and mouse, web requests, database queries, etc)
a way of delivering an output (logging to unique log files, through syslog, or to stdout/stderr, showing something on a screen, playing a sound, returning a message to the client, etc)
storage (optional)
some cpu and memory capacity
That’s really it. If something isn’t working, it’s pretty much exclusively going to fall into one of those categories. What that means is going to vary significantly from app to app but understanding this is how literally everything works makes the troubleshooting process a lot easier.
Workspace Matrix: provides a customizable n x m workspace grid, and a customizable pop-up that shows live preview of all workspaces and their windows (incl. e.g. video playing).
In combination, these two features allow me very quick overview of everything I have open, presented in an ordered fashion, allowing quick, keyboard-driven application change.
I’m not aware that the exact features of Workspace Matrix are reproduced by anything in any other DE.
Oh, true, you don’t get previews of the windows inside. However, that shouldn’t be very hard to implement, so you might have luck if you ask for it to be in Plasma 6.
I first tried KDE Plasma 5 but tbh I thought it was just a worse experience than Win7, it was really close but all the tiny little annoyances got in the way and it felt like I couldn’t do everything I needed through GUI so I still had to use terminal but it was awkward having to switch between using the keyboard and mouse and I would navigate through the GUI to get to directories then open terminal…
After a month or two of that I finally tried a tiling WM (i3wm) and it’s just a way way better user experience than any DE.
I will note though that I’m using Fish for my interactive shell and seeing anything in the tiny dmenu was just way too hard until I used Rofi for drun.
Without Fish and Rofi I might’ve tried more DEs or even gone back to Win7.
I recently used Linux Mint with Cinnamon on a relative’s PC and using Bash and the apt package manager sucks so bad. I even prefer Arch KDE, although I think Nemo is a bit better than Dolphin.
Anyway it’s been about 2 years of daily driving Arch with i3wm for me and I haven’t really gone out of my way to learn things but you naturally pick stuff up along the way just by using it.
Just make sure you’ve got another device with an internet connection in case something happens. I basically haven’t had any issues after I got better but I made a lot of user errors at the start. Nothing that can’t be fixed but finding out how to do the fixing without internet is a million times harder.
Gnome’s window sizing has always looked comical on my display. So I fix it with Orchis gtk compact theme. Also GSconnect is an irreplaceable utility for me.
I don’t know how helpful it is to split stuff out like that. Especially grouping so many things under “default applications and daemons”, which is most of what a desktop distro is. Also depends largely on a PC vs server setup.
should list an init system as its own bullet, which others have mentioned.
“one or more shells” doesn’t mean that much. Yes, every distro includes one but the only difference between a terminal and any other application is that a terminal needs to be able to escalate to root privileges. You can think of it as just another default (but special) application. A lot of stuff that people think about when they think of Linux distros is just various clever mechanisms for supporting the terminal shell. Like the PATH environment variable. If you are using actual desktop applications other than a terminal, there isn’t any interaction with the terminal shell application.
There’s also fwupd, for updating firmware (your hardware is gonna be running out of date/buggy/insecure code if you don’t have this).
The dbus daemon falls under the “daemons” bullet but it’s pretty important, like wayland/x11 it’s another IPC mechanism you need for programs to work correctly.
There’s also the sound system. PipeWire is the modern one that implements the interfaces of various other sound systems so existing applications work with it. pipewire.org (PipeWire also has its own IPC protocol like dbus/wayland/x11).
flatpak, snap, distrobox, toolbox, docker, podman, etc. for running sandboxed PC/server applications. I assume there are some programs that are flatpak-only these days.
gsettings/dconf for Windows-registry like config that many programs use.
There’s also plugging in an implementation of the glibc Name Service Switch, which allows libc to use a mechanism other than /etc/passwd and related files for user accounts, internet service names, DNS resolution, etc. . systemd can provide NSS implementations using its own user account mechanism.
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