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.
I agree with what other people have said about using the command line more and the gui less, that will make you have to learn about utils like find, grep, sed, and maybe awk.
Try learning vim (or emacs). Use some command like tools for stuff you’d do in the gui. Try some basic scripting for common tasks. Maybe write some short python/ruby scripts if you need them. I’ve found that writing code has given me a need for learning more about how the command line works, and other “power user” features.
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. downgrade from 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 like compositor/wm/DE which allow for keyboard driven movement of windows between workspaces and workspaces between monitors. Especially the latter requirement is only met by a few wms, e.g. sway/i3, hyprland.
I can’t stand it if switching to the next workspace all workspaces on all monitors change. This makes it annoying to use with a second monitor that mostly display the same windows (e.g. messaging, video, docs).
That’s true, most WMs have a simplistic workspace geometry, where they spread a workspace across all monitors (regardless of their placement). I suspect that, since the workspace abstraction comes above monitors it may not even be possible for them to have a workspace split between monitors.
Tiling addons. I like having a full DE, but I also want tiling, so Pop!_Shell on GNOME and Polonium on KDE are invaluable (and yes, COSMIC looks really promising).
It would be the OS (in this context) that you use most often on a daily basis. When the OP logs onto their computer, they would be using Linux as opposed to Windows.
I think it’s a bleedover from car culture - you keep your fun car in the garage and have a second car that you’re okay with driving daily. Especially so during winter.
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 :)
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
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.
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