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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

Honestly most of the people that approach me to learn Linux, I have them follow the Gentoo Handbook to compile and configure a Linux workstation from scratch.

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This has been my go-to training approach for decades. Many of those individuals are now in high-seniority roles that encompasses Linux Administration.

It is a tried and true method. If you want to be _good_ with Linux (including administration), build it: Follow the Gentoo Handbook, and restart every time something is wrong or fails.

Alternatively, if you want to be a semi-competent user you can go the path of installing a user-friendly distribution (like Ubuntu, etc.) and get various Windows-based workstreams working (Gaming, Windows-Only Software through Wine, etc.) But this is less likely to push you to the same tier.

I assume this is very similar to the Linux from scratch book? https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Any advantages or disadvantages?

Gentoo handbook method is a lot friendlier than following LFS, yet you stil have to deal somewhat with linux internals. IMO the main advantage over LFS is that is close enough to day to day linux administration that it serves more as a real experience than LFS which seems more like an academic experiment. OTOH, watching stuff compile is the worst part. I would complement the experience with using something like arch for a few weeks as main driver. Quicker than watch compilation logs, still you have to deal enough with linux internals.

This is what I did when I was about 14 on my pentium 4 to keep my room warm in winter and sleep with white noise. It also worked great for me to understand where everything was in my install.

Unfortunately when the gentoo wiki got nuked like 12 years ago I was in the middle of a reinstall and so I couldn’t finish it and moved on to other things. Used arch for a while but it became my second job to keep it running and it wasn’t worth it. As things started branching out I no longer understand what’s what. Every time there is some drama over some decision some distro made I feel like I don’t know either. Wayland or no wayland, snap, etc.

I have a friend who's asked me to teach him a bit about Linux and computers in general when we hang out. We haven't done much, basically I let him muck around in a TTY for a bit one day. I've considered just giving him one of my old spare PCs and having him build his own Gentoo system.

Any tips for following this approach?

Well, “Linux” is a broad thing that involves a ton of software. I always advocate that people research a problem domain and what software solutions exist for that domain in a standard Linux installation.

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