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
Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.
(* as long as you're willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you've fucked up.)
Well that is like telling a developer who knew nothing about containers, kubernetes or the kernel cgroups are the best way to learn container tech.
I'm just comparing in terms of complexity. Not functionality. And yes they have fundamental concepts that helps. But that is not needed for everyone.
In other words, vast majority of the users don't need to know the complexities of these things. A user friendly platform like Docker is all they need. We all know it is because of how good the developer tooling of Docker, was the major reason for the wide spread usage of containers.
Those who have interest, and like to explore more may take on kubernetes after learning Docker and fundamentals of containerisation.
I think so too actually if you're looking to learn the basics.
Arch has very little actual "distribution" in its system (mostly pacman and mkinitcpio) and the former is a glorified tar with a database, and while it can run scripts, you're expected to configure and set up everyone yourself using the upstream tools, and these usually come vanilla
I daily drove it for 15 years before I switched so it's not like Arch is insured for that. But if you want to learn the basics of modern Linux it's a good choice
Not this misleading shit again π€¦
Did you miss the "memes" in "linuxmemes"?
Besides, there is nothing misleading about it. I've learned more about Linux from breaking and then fixing my system than any course or tutorial could teach me. And that isn't just knowledge, it's real experience that I could apply professionally when one of our ancient Ubuntu servers crapped out.
For a beginner who is interested in learning how Linux works, Arch's inherently higher requirement for technical skills (or the ability and willingness to develop those skills) may be more valuable than just having a stable and reliable system.