I'd suggest you learn about partitioning and bootloaders and multiboot to begin with.

Gparted is a good tool. I think it's easier to understand what I'm doing when I see a picture of the drive and the partitions. When you install distros, don't use any of the automatic alternative for choosing where to install, use the "advanced" option. You get more control and you get better understanding about what you're doing.

Learn about Grub. There is different ways to set up multiboot with Grub (or other bootloaders), but I definately think the easiest way is to have a separate partition for grub and add entries to it manually. Then you get both control and better understanding of it. It's also not connected to anyone of the installed distros, so you can remove distros you don't want to keep without thinking of which one is responsible for grub. Even Grub2 is not difficult at all to edit manually. Arch's wiki page about Grub is great, as the rest of Arch's wiki. Also learn how to reinstall Grub when mbr is overwritten, because that will most probably happen.

Install all distros your curious about. You can learn from all. Before I installed Arch i was running Archbang for one week. I learned most basic things about Arch in Archbang, and then it was easier to install Arch, because I already knew about Pacman (the package manager). And I could also look att different config files and get ideas from them. I could see what was working in Archbang, and then I knew it was possible to make it work also in Arch.

If you want to learn how to fix your system when it's broken, the best way to learn is to break it... "If it ain't broken - break it!

And most important of all: Have fun!

I think this book RHCSA-RHCE Red Hat Linux is very helpful for learning more

@z99
I have read that book, I have even cleared RHCE, but most of the info in it is either specific to RedHat based distros or thay are outdated.

@Lennie
That's a brilliant advice. I will give it a shot.

@snowpine
Yup! for serious work, I do prefer Fedora over anything else, Now a days I think Mint too is good.

@TobiSGD
I wouldn't like to go for VMs because the hardware they emulate may not be the real one you are having. So, It is less fun tweaking.

@cascade9
Yeah, LFS is again a good choice to get an hold of Linux Internals. By the way I would prefer a different system because I am already having an old desktop, and now planning to buy a Laptop.

@John VV
The hardships in installing and managing Arch Linux is the reason I would like to try. But yeah, I would give a solid read to the guide book and wiki first

Laptops are much more of a pain than desktops with linux.

If you really want a laptop, be very careful about what model you buy.

Yeah! Sadly in my country all dos based on Linux based Laptops have useless configuration. Painfully I have to pay for Windows 8 also, only to dump it afterwards. I will also look into forums and sites to see which one has better drivers support in Linux.

Be careful with that as well.

I've seen lots of advice that is out of date and useless with laptops. For example I still see lots of 'get nVidia GPU with your laptop' advice here and there, even though its been years since nVidia 'optimus' was released. Optimus has no offical support with linux, and while its possible to sometimes get it going, its a pain to say the least.

Some people who give out the 'get an nVidia GPU with a laptop' advice are just 'out of date', some of them think that the fiddling around with bumblebee is easy, some of them are doing it for political reasons.

IMO unless you actually need a laptop (not 'think it would be handy' or 'it would be useful to be able to move the the lounge room with my computer') buy a desktop. Much simpler, cheaper, and less issues overall.

you just need to do research before buying. my thinkpad has an nvidia graphics card, but the bios has a builtin/discrete/optimus selector, which means i can manually choose between intel and nvidia graphics. before you buy, just type "<laptop-model> linux" into google and see what people's experience is.

@cascade9 @Berhanie

That's really wise. It is annoying, because you can't assemble Laptops and then, these companies simply state that we support only windows.

Finally installed Arch on VirtualBox with Cinnamon and Alsa. I will port it on my desktop after testing and getting more familiar. Everyone thanks for the help

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._Install_Guide
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide

Between these two guides, you should be able to install Arch.