Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there's more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.
In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.
And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.
So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there's more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON'T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!
shoutouts to tux
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 did it this way too, with a small debian home server/media center about 15 years back (i had another debian set up on my main rig about 20 years back, but since i am a gamer, i did not do much more than dabble a bit in it). After Proton became a thing and i was unwilling to switch to Win11, i installed Nobara. Since then i have learned a lot, and i even got myself some literature to learn about computers for the first time in my life (got a bundle of O'Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux and surrounding things for a good price)
I generally find O'Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux to be really useful! It's a perfect way to learn the fundamentals, personally I haven't gone too deep into computers yet. As that is going to happen when I learn more about C programming as it will be important then! Right now, I don't have to go too deep into computers, as I am learning more about Python. So my Linux learning tends to relate on how you manipulate the system via terminal and fix weird ass problems that can happen sometimes!
Lol i can sing a song about weird ass problems on Linux. Currenty i have the issue that my PC randomly cant get SMART data from single hard drives - i have 5 HDDs (2 on the internal controller, the other 3 in an external casing using USB), 1 SSD (on the internal controller), 1 M.2 NVME drive and an extra PCIE controller with 2 M.2 Sata drives. So the issue is spread across at least 4 different controllers (internal, M.2, PCIE, External per USB) and even different power supplies - i don't even know where to start. Smart data itself is fine for all drives. Started with the last big Fedora update.
Oh, Fedora updates have been known to break stuff occasionally and that honestly blows! I do hope you'll be able to figure it all out in the end because that seems like this is going to cause you a terrible troubleshooter headache. As the issue seems so arbitrary yet it is a major issue, at least the SMART data itself is fine but...Damn that is a crazy issue to have to diagnose.
Haven't had the time to really look at it yet, but the logfiles look like single drives become disconnected for fractions of a second while smart data is read - not long enough to cause them to become dismounted. So i can't really rule out some strange hardware issue too... Preliminary web search isnt too forthcoming with possible reasons -.- If i find out what the reason is, i'll update here.
EDIT: THINK I FIXED IT! It seems like the USB cable leading to the external drive case was damaged (i thought of that because i hit my foot on the table and it instantly reported a SMART error) - since i replaced the cable, i did not have any more occurrences. I do NOT have the slightest clue why this would affect reading SMART data from the other drives tho...
Edit 2: Yep, no issues since then. I can only suspect that grabbing smart data when the cable malfunctioned stalled the service, and what hard drive was reported was whereever the internal logic had to wait for the stalled service - pretty strange, but the only way i can explain how devices on a different controller and different PSUs were showing up too.