Good day all,
I’m currently about 3 months into using Linux exclusively for personal computing and gaming. I stared out trying EndeavourOs /w the Linux Surface kernel on my Surface, having now settled on Manjaro on my surface and CachyOS on my gaming rig.
So far the experience has been relatively painless. Now, having settled down comfortably into a rhythm of running sudo pacman -Syu, getting lost in the AUR and wiki, I feel like exploring more into what Linux has to offer.
So, on to my question, what do i do now? There’s a bit of choice paralysis for me. Where did you all decide to dig in first? What resources did you use? What projects did you take on to deepen your knowledge? What do you feel is essential for crossing the threshold from average user to almost-superuser, then from there and beyond?
Thanks in advance for your time. Hope to hear from you all soon.
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Enjoy your stable systems while you can! Learning comes through solving problems as they come up. It’s a good sign if you don’t have to.
Need some new functionality? Figure out how to set it up. Encounter a bug or issue? Troubleshoot and fix it. Functionality that you want doesn’t exist? Time to program it yourself.
You can also start customizing (ricing) your system as you wish. Take a look at unixporn style communities for inspiration and advice.
Thanks for the reply.
I’m guessing systems tend to lose stability over time? What’s something that broke that you’ve had to fix in the past that sticks out in your mind, doesn’t matter the reason.
I’ve been using Linux a long time. Eventually when you get a brand spanking new system or upgrade a component, you will inevitably have to compile a driver from source.
For the longest time, I had to extract garbage from a Windows wifi driver, package it into a Linux driver and pray it worked. Every. New. Kernel.
Now most of my hardware just about works unless it’s super fresh. More than anything my problems stem from some Library I use for a hobby project being poorly documented, requiring an ancient external source, or just being incomplete in a way I find frustrating.
So my answer is start hobby coding and then hate your life because everything you learned is functionally incomplete and existentially annoying.
Looking directly at you Intel Extension for Pytorch.
Thanks for the insight thus far. I appreciate it.
Bluetooth, obscure laptop quirks, audio, fonts, maybe a dozen Nvidia related issues. Seldom all at once- but have been at it over a decade. >.<
Not an ‘over time’ issue caused like Microsoft’s creepy fetish for more and more of your habits/data but, our devs are human volunteers, usually with day-jobs.
Highly recommend a bare-metal, manual install of Arch- promise it’s not as scary as it might look, just lots of reading… When stuff breaks, you’ll have a decent idea of how your system is put together and where things have gone wrong. Congrats on objectively picking a derivitive of the finest pre-compiled distro Gnu/Linux has to offer! .
Thank you for the info! That arch install is looking more and more like the next project I’ll be taking.
That’s it. Broke my installation when I reverted to a snapshot that had a different kernel installed. Could fix it with arch-chroot and learned a thing or two how btrfs subvolumes work.
- Subsribe to TheLinuxExperiment
- Install vanilla Arch Linux using archinstall or a third-party helper script
- Install vanilla Arch Linux using either a guide or the wiki
- Play around with other distributions, such as Debian and Fedora
- Play around with special distributions, such as Devuan (which doesn’t use systemd), Alpine (which doesn’t use glibc), Dragora (which uses Linux-libre), Arch Hurd (which uses
rms’ Hurd kernel), or even a BSD (which does not use the Linux kernel). - Find your niche
Thanks for this. I’ve been eyeing archinstall but have held off until i find a cheap desktop to “destroy” testing things out.
I’ve given Debian a spin and honestly don’t care too much for it, probably due to my first exposure to linux being arch-based (I refuse to say “I use arch btw” until i have more than a layman’s idea of everything). My experience with Fedora is limited to flashing Bazzite on my Steam Deck yesterday, so I’m still feeling around.
I have a device running Ubuntu for my PiHole and that’s about it.
This is the first time I’ve heard of TheLinuxExperiment, looks interesing so I’ll be sure to give it a watch on my off time.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to type this out. Cheers!
Don’t even need another computer to test out building Arch. Try it in a VM first, then you’ll know what to expect when you do it on bare metal!
If you want to try Debian, look up Spiral Linux. It is to Debian as Endeavor is to Arch. I tried it out in a VM, and I was surprised how painless it was. Also, they have a few sane defaults from the get go, so it’s better for more people.
Good luck!
If it works why do you want to change it?
Not trying to change anything for the sake of change. The intent of my question was to try and get insight from people more experienced/knowledgeable than me on how to deepen my knowledge. So far distro-hopping and initial troubleshooting has been fun… and time consuming.
Currently I’m in surface deep, looking to expand my horizons, and turning to the community for their two cents.
Build a stable system on a well beaten path and then get a homelab type setup. It can be either virtual or partially real hardware
Thanks for mentioning homelab. They seem quite useful from a quick search. If you remember your first setup, what hardware did you settle on and why? What has changed since? Any pains along the way?
That’s a huge rabbit hole that will steal thousands of hours of your time.
If your computer has more than 4 cores and at least 16gb of ram you can run virtual machines in virtual manager. If you are lacking on specs or you want to separate out everything you can pickup a used small form factor or medium form factor for relatively cheap. I would go for Proxmox early as it will scale to many machines and will allow easy hardware swaps as you can just transfer the VMs over. Proxmox can also do live transfers between hosts so you don’t need to worry about having to shut down services to move things around.
Honestly I didn’t really get into home labing and self hosting until much later. I have been using Linux for a significant amount of time and I can’t really recall much about how I actually got started. It sort of just happened.
I would take a look at ways to backup your system and how to maintain it. Maybe self hosting something like Jellyfin, otherwise you could always some little fun customizing desktops and window managers.
What method/software do you use to create/manage your backups? No need to get into the weeds if you don’t want to, I’ll look up the specifics on my own.
What’s a mistake you made, if any, when backing up your systems?
I’ve actually been on the hunt for a cheap desktop to turn into a media server but everyone around me is overvaluing their 12 year old hardware, might just bite the bullet and make one myself.
I use timeshift(backup/restore utility) using BTRFS (file system type) and mounted subvolumes wrong and something else, when I tried to restored I borked my system.
As for the media server, some will suggest using no GUI or a very light desktop for convenience(XFCE maybe…). If you feel comfortable in the cli then its a no brainer, everything is faster. Oh and probably Debian for servers.
If you don’t use shell already, get comfortable with it. You’ll need it at the latest when your GUI won’t work anymore.
Learn to read and search in logfiles, navigate the filesystem, copy files, using a text editor etc.
You could learn the topics covered by a recognized certification like RHCSA / LFCS. No need to actually get the certification if you don’t feel like it, but look at the subjects covered and learn that stuff. That should give you a good foundation.
