Hey all,

So, I just got back into Linux, which can appropriately be understood as my first honest exploration of the Unix base, around a year ago. What had happened was, I just got fed up with NS systems. Thus, I did what any rational person would do by creating a live disk and subsequently taking the sledgehammer of dd to my entire hard drive. While the action undoubtedly did more good than harm, there are probably less extreme measures that could have been taken. Regardless, after about a week or two of frustrations and hardly being able to use my PC, I became competent enough to have the system properly partitioned and running smoothly and haven't had any real problems, at least none I was not able to overcome by using a search engine, since. Anyway, all of that is neither here nor there and is being stated only as a general indicator so that you all are able to make a rough estimation in relation to my experience level. Basically, I know enough to break my shit and, sometimes, I know enough to fix it.

What I am looking for are resources, preferably free, so as to better understand the entire process of what makes Linux tick. What I am thinking, at least in regards to the distro I will use to achieve this end, is building my own desktop in Arch. Any suggestions?

Man and info pages. Also some of the Linux Documentation Project HOWTOs. It's very out of date now but anything that doesn't depend heavily on your hardware is probably still valid. The Arch wiki, as recommended by Ondoho, is useful even if you aren't using Arch. Actually this site has a wiki too, which you could look at.

1 members found this post helpful.

Welcome to LQ!

I personally relate quite well to your own self-assessment. And i can say that i have found linuxquestions.org itself to be one of the best self-education resources i've found. Just ask your question here and you will usually learn what you need to.

Some other resources:
man pages (already suggested)
w3schools.com
google searches (you already know)

The cool thing about LQ is that you can keep coming back here as you gain experience, and help others with your newfound knowledge

Fisk,

Welcome to LQ forums.

These links may be useful.

Linux Journey:
https://linuxjourney.com/

Land of Linux:
http://www.landoflinux.com/index.html

Linux Basic Fundamentals Guide and Tutorial:
http://www.landoflinux.com/linux_bas...damentals.html

Bash Scripting Tutorial:
http://www.landoflinux.com/linux_bas..._tutorial.html

OP: and it also depends on your goal. If you want to really learn the internals of Linux at a very low level, LFS is probably the better bet. Linux distros are all essentially the same (if using systemd) and all somewhat different if not. The real variations are in package management tools and init systems. Arch really isn't gong to teach you much about Linux but it will get you comfortable at the command line.

I am not recommending LFS so before anyone jumps on me, I am just saying it is probably a good learning tool if you really want to learn low level: toolchain, kernel, etc. For that matter, Gentoo would as well, but again, Gentoo is very different because of the magic emerge and other "e" scripts.

Really depends on your use case and goals.

Yeah, just pick one and go with it, tinker with it, if need be in a VM so you can snapshot it while it's working to restore it if you completely butcher it.
LFS is probably the most insightful one, but any distro will do, especially if you mess around with kernels and software/scripts. Linux isn't that hard anyway, what's more difficult is using it for some purpose.

Like setting up networks with security, permissions and all the fixings, but that's just an application of tools, etc.

Also, learning is all fine and good, but there's also unlearning. My favorite loveydovey distro is Slackware, and Slackware is sometimes seen as a "you will learn Linux with this distro" distro, and I think that's true...but!
It's also super stable and I've forgotten several things I had to do ages ago at some point, things like setting the order of soundcards or other such minor things in some file somewhere.
That said, the familiarity overall would enable me to take good guesses right now, but I'd probably just look it up, to be honest :P

So, take that into consideration, too. Learning Linux just for desktop use is super easy, or at the very least, not that much to learn. Otherwise it's more tricky depending on what your computer should do, but that's mostly a matter of software and not the OS.
It's like "I want Linux as my font designing machine", where ultimately you end up having to wrestle with FontForge more than Linux cause that's the software that does your task, it just happens to also run on Linux.

But yeah, Linux from Scratch will give you a lot of information, as well as reading into Kernel stuff (which the Linux thing actually gets its name from).

Here's a full online library - more books than you can read (& free) https://www.linuxtopia.org/