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.

Pantherina,

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

zhenbo_endle,
  • 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

cogitoprinciple,
@cogitoprinciple@lemmy.world avatar

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.

nickhammes,

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.

cogitoprinciple,
@cogitoprinciple@lemmy.world avatar

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.

otl,

Alpine Linux might be good, too. It’s different. But that makes it a great exercise. See drewdevault.com/…/Praise-for-Alpine-Linux.html

Astaroth,

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.

dotslashme,

This might be something for you linuxupskillchallenge.org

WindowsEnjoyer,

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.

onlinepersona,

linuxjourney.com

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