Linux

And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Incrementally over time by reading the documentation and/or manuals of the commands I need to run and looking up how others solve the problems that I need to get other ideas about things (even, periodically, for things that I already know how to do to see if anyone has found a better way to do it or if a new tool has come out that helps). And trying things out/experimenting with different ways of doing things to find out what works well or not.

I have sort of had enough of copy and pasting commands I find on the internet without having a good understanding of how they actually work.

One thing you could do is start trying to understand those commands.

Read the man pages or the documentation to figure out what the commands are actually doing. Once you have the "what" , you can dig deeper to get to the "why" if it isn't obvious by that point.

After enough of that, you'll go to copy/paste and already understand what it's doing without needing to look it up again.

Then from there, it's a matter of building the instinct to be able to say "I need to do X, so I'll use commands Y and Z."

https://programming.dev/c/linuxupskillchallenge

1. Learn FreeBSD.

2. Learn Linux.

/s

If you're in the position to take certificates then that's a another way of learning a lot. At least it has worked for me. I've over the last half year taken RHCSA and RHCE from RedHat - though paid by work. Theses in specific are expensive, but I'm sure there are other ones that are cheaper. This would also allow you to 'show off' your skills in an official way should you need to, for applying for certain jobs etc..

I at least find this way to be helpful as you have to motivate yourself to learn and pass an exam to get the certificate. It might not be for everyone though.

With arch, I'd recommend just jumping in the deep and and installing it, looking things up on the wiki when something goes wrong. Just do it in a virtual machine or on an old laptop or something to start with. I broke my previous distro (mint) by doing some really stupid stuff, and I decided to just go fuck it and install arch. I don't think I've ever learned as much about linux as that weekend.

I suppose that I was already pretty comfortable with the terminal since I was studying computer science at the time so I had a lot of reason to use it. I think the best way to use the terminal is to force yourself to use it, programming is great for this but you can try e.g. sorting your photos or mp3 files or something as practice too.

Another book rec: https://pragprog.com/titles/bhcldev/small-sharp-software-tools/

Attempt an Arch install entirely from memory. You might want to try this in a VM, in case something goes wrong, but just do it. If you can't quite remember what to do, man and ls /bin are your friends.

When you are doing stuff in the terminal write it down somewhere else also, on a piece of real life paper or in a simple text document or whatever works for you.

In general I found taking notes while trying to do things in the terminal helped me learn.

I guess my end goal is to be able to comfortably install and use arch Linux with my own customization’s and be able to fix it when things go wrong.

Why? I have been using Linux for nearly two decades and I am perfectly content with a low-config distro and desktop environment. You don’t have to use Arch but if you insist get a Steam Deck.

My advice would be look up The Missing Semester it’s a free online MIT course on how to use the terminal and it will govern you a better understanding of how to use it and Linux more generally. Really helpful to find your way around and give you an intuitive sense of what you’re trying to achieve.

Then beyond that installing arch is easy with archinstall but it’s probably more helpful to learn about the components of desktop Linux and what they do so that you actually know what you’re doing.

Arch Linux Handbook on internet Archive

Using tldr to learn commands. It gives you the information you are probably looking for in the man page but it's not buried among lines and lines and lines of arcane stuff and it's formatted in a readable way with helpful examples. Saved my sanity more than once.

I'm not saying "don't read the man pages", they are great way to get a deeper understanding of commands. But when you are just wondering what a command does and how it's commonly used, then a two lines summary + example is much more helpful than an essay going in minute details over everything.

Since it takes a lot less time than hunting the same info in the man page, you can run it before every command you are not familiar with, without too much hassle. Then if you want more info you can check the man page.

Here is a bunch of random tips to become more comfortable with the terminal.

Do absolutely everything that you can on the terminal.

When you install something, enable the verbose if possible and snoop around the logs to see what is happening.

If an app or an install fails, look at the logs to see what is the issue, and try to fix it by actually resolving the error itself first instead of finding the commands on the internet to fix your issue.

Instead of googling for your command options, use the help menu from the application and try to figure out how to use the command from there.

"I take full responsibility for my Arch system."

on the tailend of a convo in in a discord recently I added a command to the "customize chatgpt" section to allow chatgpt to have a custom "man" like command similar to linux, but that works for all code or commands.

This makes chatgpt give me a Linux command or code snippet formated in a table explaining what each piece of the command does.

when a prompt is givin beginning with the word man followed by code or commands please respond with a table following these rules and nothing else: skip title row, No backticks around command components, No unnecessary rows, column 1 should contain the command component, column 2 should contain a brief command description

Switch to rolling distro, it will break so many things with each update you'll learn stuff by fixing it. Also you can check https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/