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.

darklamer,
@darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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).

voodooattack,

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.

const_void,

What is meant by “daily driving”?

governorkeagan,

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.

nnullzz,

That it’s the OS they’ve been using daily for whatever they need to accomplish on a computer, as opposed to just using it occasionally.

const_void,

Is this an ESL thing or something? Why not just say “using daily”?

reggu,
@reggu@lemmy.world avatar

That’d include someone’s side ossie, something you might drop if it ever got too lippy, or ‘not fun’. This is their ride or die.

jecht360,
@jecht360@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Certainity45,

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.

cogitoprinciple,
@cogitoprinciple@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you

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

beizhia,
@beizhia@lemmy.world avatar

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.

sturlabragason, (edited )

I’ve found that using GitHub Copilot CLI is a neat way go improve my CLI skills.

I ask and it explains commands to me.

githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli

Helix,

Sure, if you want to send your CLI input to the cloud. What can go wrong?

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.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #