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
For real. Some guy I knew introduced me to SuSE back when I was in highschool. It was great and all, but it made things easy by hiding details behind snappy GUIs. While I was in college, I started to realize I wasn't learning anything about Linux. So I took a deep breath and installed Gentoo. Switched to Arch for a while, but I'm back to Gentoo now. I wanted to learn more about how Linux really worked and holy shit did I get my wish.
Ain't no way I will ever try Gentoo. I don't even know what "compiling from source" means or what the difference between that an "binaries" are.
You know, it is shocking I work IT when I barely understand tech at all. Though to be fair I am a help desk guy. I have Google IT Support, ITIL 4 Foundation, CCNA, and Security+ so I know some stuff. Kind of. A bit.
I should just take that Linux+ class shouldn't I?
To make it simple:
"Source code" is readable human code which is a set of instructions you give to the computer, think of it like a tutorial the computer reads to do stuff
"compiling from source" is that act of making human readable code in to computer readable code, computers can only understand machine code, luckly compiling is automatic these days
"Binaries" are packages which contain all the compiled code ex:
.exeor.binfiles.deb is more akin to .msi no? it's a self-contained package file which contains the components to install an application, not a binary executable itself.
Oh yeah, my bad, i gotta fix
No need to take a class. Find a project you want to do and a engineer/system admin who's willing to mentor.
you could always go for LPIC, the books/courses tend to be quite cheap and the exams usually are cheap as well
LPIC will provide you with a stable foundation that you can venture out from on your own