I am a Linux beginner/amateur and 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.

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.

What tips/ideas do you have for getting better at navigating the terminal, and getting a better understanding of how the os works. What is a good roadmap to follow? And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Edit: my current distro is bazzite just in case you were interested and thanks for all the replies you are all really helpful.

  • _____@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I can tell you how I learned linux. be prepared to cringe.

    1. I installed Linux before going to school, I figured that if I used Linux as my main OS I would be less tempted to dick around and play games

    2. I eventually found a coop part time job as a dev. I used my own Linux machine, and being the star eyed young person I was I used arch.

    this is the cringe part:

    1. I did dev work on arch Linux without fully understanding how it works and ran into multiple issues (none of which was because of arch). for instance my USB wifi driver was the dogshit broadcom ones so the “drivers” for it were kind of messed and I had to hack several things into get it to work.

    I learned systemd, Linux kernel modules, dkpg, obviously more familiarity with bash and shell stuff

    1. I ran into issues with grub because FUCK grub. so I had to learn about boot loaders, fixing your install with chroot on a live usb, I also wrote step by step guides to untuck my particular problem just in case I run into it again

    so moral of the story is… dive in?

    • dai@lemmy.world
      5·
      4 days ago

      Purely just send.

      You ain’t gonna learn to swim in the wading pool, take a leap and break something.

      It’s like any job - you can be talked to about x, y or z until the cows come home but until you stub your toe on a specific issue it’s mostly just fluff.

      I’ve committed unencrypted secrets to codeberg, deleted boot partitions without rebuilding (nixos), tested most Linux distros until I got comfortable.

      Dumb mistakes are bound to happen (I feel mostly to me) but you don’t learn without seeing the repercussions. Linux isn’t scary - closed source crapware is; no matter how “user friendly” it’s made out to be.

      Edit: formatting