Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there’s more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.
In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.
And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.
So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there’s more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON’T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!
shoutouts to tux
I kinda started by rawdogging it, but it was just because I wanted to go further into my privacy journey and use Linux to get away from Windows telemetry. I knew to start on an easy kinda foolproof distro, so I picked Fedora Silverblue cause it’s atomic. But after figuring out it’s REALLY hard to tinker with when trying to use some slightly obscure software/make certain tricks work, I just switched to reg Fedora and never looked back.
A few months later I took a Linux course at my college, and I loved it, although it focused more on Cybersecurity and administration stuff rather than just basic Linux usage and how to get around. We we’re solely in the terminal, nothing about LibreOffice or the like. It was also a Kali VM we were using, which makes sense for the purposes of the class.
But taking that class really made it easier for me to be confident with the CLI, and it also helped give me Ubuntu/Debian knowledge to make managing my Proxmox easier. So while I could’ve definitely “rawdogged it”, having a structured environment to fuck up in but also get someone else to help you was great.
Yeah, I would imagine most classes would concentrate on supporting headless server systems over learning any particular gui. They’re more the kind of thing meant to be put on a job application than to teach for personal use.