I switched to linux when i was already a programmer and comfortable with terminal use, so my experience probably wasn’t the same. But the most efficient way to “learn” linux is to just start using it (option 2: doing projects and learning on the way). Get comfy installing packages from the terminal (apt, pacman, whatever) and reading man pages, and everything else will fall into place as you try new things and learn how theyre done. these things take time.

The Arch Wiki wiki.archlinux.org is the greatest thing ever created and will be indispensable no matter what OS you use, though all commands and tips assume the reader uses Arch.

yeah i just full swapped to daily driver about 3 months ago and havent looked back. Youtube is a great resource as well as other linux forums. I’m running fedora 38 and i love it

There are any number of tutorials you can find on Google or duckduck go or any search engine. 😉 I have heard it said that building an Arch Linux instance “from scratch” using a tutorial is a good learning experience for a moderate skill user.

A few key skills jump out at me as a casual CLI user:

• Package managers (search, install, and uninstall packages, add repositories and refresh package lists)
• Compiling packages as-is from git repositories isn’t all that hard with a tutorial
• Editing configuration files from command line using vim/emacs (don’t use emacs lol) is a must if you’re ever in a situation where the DE won’t load
• Grub menu: if you have a problem booting, editing the file your computer uses to set boot flags is a very valuable skill
• Watch some YouTube videos about Linux distros to see their philosophy/usages. For example: Debian is ultra stable with long release window and WIDE hardware support so stuff gets out of date but it runs on a potato, Arch/Manjaro/etc is rolling release with less stability but fastest updates, Fedora made by Red Hat is useful for enterprise, Linux Mint/Ubuntu are very user friendly, Puppy Linux is user friendly and very lightweight, Gentoo is for if you want to compile all the packages yourself (A HUGE PAIN), etc.
• learn what a desktop environment is and how a display server (xorg or wayland) works
• The man (manual) command is your friend! The syntax is “man [any command/program here no brackets]”

It started around 2014/15 for me. Was a big Mac user since OS X, but the increasing walled-garden aspect Apple was beginning to implement was a major deciding factor. I had tried out Ubuntu in a VM sometime around 2007/08, but it never really clicked and was content on Mac at the time.

I started researching Linux and made the jump onto Linux Mint. So many of the roadblocks and issues I felt were becoming very apparent on Mac were suddenly non-existent, and I continued on just self-learning and exploring what’s possible. Now getting close to a decade later after jumping from Linux Mint to Debian to now Void, I could never go back to anything else