I’ve got a Pop_OS system76 machine that runs well straight out of the box. I love it and it’s my daily driver. However I’d like to learn more about how it works, Linux internals and how to use it to the best of its capabilities. I want to learn about things like system-d Wayland, error logging (there seems to be a few of them) directory structure and drivers. For instance, how do I know that my and GPU is being leveraged to the fullest?
I DONT want to build a system from the ground up, which I expect to be a common suggestion.
I’d prefer to read literature, blogs, and articles relevant to me, my system and not dated.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance
You want to read literature? Try the man pages available from a shell / terminal. Don’t know where to start? man hier, man , man 5 sysfs for three. Those are where Linux puts important things or rather, in the case of the latter two, where the Linux kernel likes to pretend they are for easy access. The ‘SEE ALSO’ section of at least one of those suggests other interesting reading, and on and on.
If that’s not a direction you want to go but still want to know about something that you think might be in the Linux manual pages, try man -k keyword or apropos keyword. Replace keyword with what you want to know about and it will list all the manual pages that have the keyword in their name or description.
Start self hosting some web services.
Way ahead of you but that only scratches the surface of Linux. I’ve got a docker compose stack with a bunch of services, DNS and reverse proxies… But that doesn’t teach me about the internals on my workstation
Oh, I did that once.
su
What do you want to know?
I will say Arch isn’t the greatest learning experience. It is good if you want to learn how to install Arch but that’s about it.
The best way to learn Linux is though random (sometimes dump) side projects. Take some random idea and run with it. Spin up containers and VMs and build things.
Well for starters, my Wacom tablets drawing pen’s eraser sometimes stops working until I restart my machine. How can I restart the service for this without restarting my machine? How can I identify what service that is? How can I debug the error to prevent it in the future?
Just search or ask whatever questions you have about Linux (just like your question on GPU use). Overtime you will gain extensive knowledge of linux and before you know it you will be a linux power user.