Honestly I learned linux because I needed to turn some pumps on and off...

Made some arduino based controllers, but those were a pain to figure out how to access remotely, so raspberry pi it was, but eventually I needed more horsepower, so debian it was, then ESP-32s were popularized and now I've come full circle with a fleet of ESP-32s reporting to a debian server... eventually I'll get around to understanding some of the hardware interface in the OS a bit more.

All of it by just kind of bumping into problems

There are Linux distributions where you never need to touch the command line unless you're doing advanced stuff.

But if you're a Windows person who wants to be able to use the command line, and you think hacking is cool...

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

SSH into a server and find the password to get to the next level. Linux hacking for babies, and you can do it from a Windows computer.

The beef i have with printed tech literature is tat it ages out pretty quickly.
I prefer man pages and wikis.

I rawdogged it then took classes and learned like 1% more than I knew before from raw-dogging

I have a linux sysop manual from 1999 somewhere. Probably because I was that friend you were always trying to lure away from Windows with Red Hat dual boots and “look Starcraft plays great on Wine!”.

Yes, there are classes, but it's corporate Linux. Dockerfiles, AWS, shit like that.

Anyways:

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

Well, it doesn't matter much, actually.

If you actually wonder, it's a database (can be sqlite, tho most write their own which involves it's own set of quantum physics and mathematics for operations) of stuff that's installed and stuff that's available. "Updating repos" downloads the list of stuff and their dependencies. Actually installing involves it downloading an archive, extracting it, looking at some special file that describes it (list of files, version, hash...), doing verification stuff, checking if dependency constraints are met (again, involves database mathematics...), adding the info of the package to the "installed" database then just extracting the entire archive EXCEPT the describing/meta/special/whatever file(s) right into your root. Or whatever you told it is root.

You can make a tiny bootable Linux by literally extracting some critical packages from, for example, Alpine Linux, using your average GUI archive viewing tool.

OpenRC & SystemD

"Well, the difference being, one is a j*b and the other is mental sickness" - RED Sniper, Team Fortress 2

OpenRC is an init system. It's a system that starts (inits) different programs meant to be ran all the time (daemons).

SystemD is a suite of software. It has a few fucktons of components. Although in the context of an init system they mean the init system SystemD comes with. It may not be that bad by itself, but the other components are often poor in quality and/or resource heavy. Most distributions ignore most of them by default. And yet, everything is relying on them to the point where people who don't want the entirety of SystemD had to rewrite SystemD's components for themselves, and not the other way around.

Wayland

Protocol with a few fucktons of extensions, like X11. For putting stuff on a screen.

Difference is that X11 has functions for drawing lines and circles and shit and everything kinda went around that, which is useful with 2D accelerated hardware (if you enable it in the driver) but everything really recent (2016?) isn't so it's pointless there. It's also decades old. And window manager (and often compositor, thing doing transparency effects and stuff) is separate.

The very base of Wayland is basically a program asking for a new window and then it just has to draw stuff there itself, while extensions handle stuff like negotiating clipboard. (spoiler: if you don't have a clipboard manager there is no "clipboard", pasting something asks the program you copied from so if you closed that you don't have it). It also has HDR. Shitty but HDR. Unfortunately the progress on that is slow, because it's the @redhat.com email people dictating all the specs and making countless meetings about them of course, and everyone else just sits and listens to their bullshit. Oh, and server/compositor/wm is all one single program (although a project called "wlroots" provides most of the "server" part as a piece of code devs can copy paste). Anyways, KDE Plasma/kwin is the most feature complete server out there, although I personally "outgrowed" from it if that makes sense

Hyprland

Some kid made a Wayland server. Pretty ok quality (!!! relatively). Originally wlroots but later it's own thing ("hyproot"). It's meant for "eyecandy" shit setups, not a fan of that, ew gross, although to each their own kinks. BUT to get the stereotypical """eyecandy""" one has to either (1) spend their entire free time on fucking with configuration files and installing everything or (2) get someone else's giant ass script which compiles stuff from 16 guthib repos and then freshly extracts you a 2 gig .config directory. Lots of the time people end up turning their bar/desktop/whatever into a fucking web browser, like it's MicroWin from SoftDows. Knowingly or from a dependency for some stupid AUR package that doesn't read like it would do that by name, like "hyprpanel-git". I am not going to link an example of the dependency, it's aylur<dot>github<dot>io<slash>ags if you really want to look at that. I hope moss grows on walls of everyone who did that knowingly and actually liked it.

As for me personally, I used it for a while for it's HDR support but just never installed a bar or anything. Turned off the shaders, the wallpaper, the splash, the rounding stuff, the borders, and... "Hey, get me a Hyprland with NOTHING". So yeah. Later there was some really fucking annoying shrodenbug, I rage quit and switched to sway-git. It also has HDR nowadays, tho you gotta bind keys for turning it on/off because screensharing sucks. Just like at "home", on WinSoft from MicroDows.

20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING

Never too late I guess.

Plot twist: there's books and classes on just about everything

not only i rawdogged linux, i used a rolling distro with a lot of questionable security decisions (eherm.... Manjaro) during grad school.

... no idea how that laptop survived grad school but it did...

Around 2006 I watched a video on YouTube of a guy showing off Pendrive Linux booting from a USB drive and it blew my mind that you could run an entire OS from a lowly USB drive. I then made my own and used it to play games on the computers at my middle school and have been unfortunately addicted to Linux ever since. Later on in my 20s I took a Linux class in college and my professor was really impressed I already knew so much about Linux. 8 years of "brute forcing it" taught me quite a bit. Now I'm a jaded network administrator and have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

Ah yes the college of "Fuck it, we ball".

You don't need to read books, most stuff can be found in the Arch Wiki

Thank you Microsoft for forcing me to learn how to use and maintain Linux.

Someone told me to RTFM. I later realized that was good advice. (I learned by reading documentation)

Im just waiting till shit breaks and then panicking like a normal person

You shouldn't have to take a class for an operating system...

Linux almost needs continuing education courses. New shit comes out, and if you don't try it in the next 5-7 years, you'll end up getting it anyway.

Rawdogging gang represent!

I started in the late 90's with a Mandrake CD from a magazine. No internet meant nothing more than "this is interesting but I can't do anything with yet".

Then in school we were given a PC, an internet connection and we burned a Debian 3 CD. I became expert at reinstalling it because at the time it was the "simplest" way to unfuck what I fucked up.

Then I just winged it at work and learned a lot.

Then I just moved every system at home to Linux. Never looked back.

Sometimes I feel I still know nothing. But then, when asked to do any administrative task on Winslop/macOS that I know can do in a few seconds on Linux, I feel so hapless and inefficient that I feel it must amount to something.

It warms my heart that after your journey you realized there is still so much more to learn.

Many would leave it there and call themselves an expert

Books? Surely you mean man pages.

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.

Arch Linux is the best* beginner distro.

(* as long as you're willing to learn how to un-fuck whatever you've fucked up.)

DSL! Such a classic.

bit of a ridiculous sentiment when there's so many guides for stuff online that I wouldn't know which category to put myself in. I definitely didn't take classes nor read books on it, yet I absolutely took a guided approach.

Well the first time I ran Linux was in 99-2000, before I had proper internet (one needed to buy these prepaid dialup cards and winmodems wouldn't work on Linux), so actually had to buy a book 'The Linux Bible'. Used that book a lot, especially in the early days to troubleshoot LILO (Before GRUB) bootloader and configure dual boot. Of course, once internet was readily available, online search / forums replaced those books. Last book I bought was about redhat/mandrake rpm packaging.

I recently had to restore a backup after a btrfs partition failed and became permanently read-only, and just for fun I tried to restore the backup of the broken partition to working order and read through tons of forums and spoke on the #btrfs libera chat with the experts and at the end of it this is my advice:

Do not use btrfs, use ext4 instead. btrfs failures are unrecoverable and they don't care.

LOL Rawdogging Linux is INSANE; I did it through a bit of a cycle of reading, using my system, learning more. I still broke my systems but the fun part: I had a second HDD so all of my important bits were safe typically. I distro-hopped for years, mostly moving between openSUSE (older version and Tumbleweed), Ubuntu (started when it was 16.04), Fedora, Mint, Debian, Bazzite, Aurora, tried Artix briefly (the community is lacking). Finally settled on Garuda Linux, btw! Found something that suits my needs and I have enough knowledge that I haven't broken my system once...Heh, good times!

I love that your friend told you about it. Everybody needs friends like that.