How to Master Linux?

First of all, the distro you use doesn't really matter that much in the end.

Two distros you definitely should not use from the beginning are Arch and Gentoo. Both are great distros, but way to complex for a beginner.

As a beginner be sure to take one of the popular ones, so that you have a large array of packages and help (forums, wikis and such).

Also, consider installing some of the others as virtual machines on your computer. So that you can try the different things on different distros without reinstalling all the time.

Consider having one of the following your daily driver and the others in vms:

- Ubuntu or debian (both debian family)

- Centos or fedora (both redhat family)

- Manjaro (arch family)

You could also add SuSE and Slackware (both their own families)

Use the machine as your daily driver and accept that mastery is a journey and it takes (a long) time.

Getting good at the terminal merely requires two things, first you must decide to use it often, and secondly time where you are using it must pass..

Distro doesn’t matter much to be honest. The problem is that this question covers a wide number of fields.

The art of unix programming is a good book to get your bearings: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/

Then learn a shell like bash, zsh, or fish thoroughly. A scripting language like Python can’t hurt. Building a custom kernel and toolchain is a fun process as well.

That’s plenty to get started. Good luck. ;-)

I'm sure you'll get lots of conflicting advice. There really is no high road that's better than the others.

Although I've been using variations of Unix since Version 5 running on a PDP-11/45, I use an Ubuntu desktop system for everyday use. Simple because it is easy to keep up to date and works well both as a graphical environment and with the terminal. My setup includes 2 LCDs in landscape mode for graphical apps and a third LCD in portrait mode exclusively as a terminal with lots of open tabs.

As for getting started, have a look at https://www.lifewire.com/beginners-guide-to-linux-4090233. Then you just need to frequently refer to the man pages and the many other guides you will find with Google. https://unix.stackexchange.com/ provides reasonably high quality answers to many common and not so common questions.

I recommend that you learn to use terminal commands well. As a pro tip, if you are using 'vi', CTRL-] is the same as ESC. When you get used to using that your speed will increase significantly. Oh, and remap the CAPS-LOCK key to be a CTRL key. You don't want to get RSI in your left pinkie.

Distro wise, I'd probably go Ubuntu simply because it's the most "mainstream ready" option. There's not much you run into that is not going to play nice with it compared to a lot of distros. It also takes a lot of pain out of the swap out of the switch at times due to that.

Honestly, the best advice I can give is to just use it as you would any other OS. It seems like common sense advice, but you really pick up a lot just by treating as if that's all you have to work with. The most important thing is to master the terminal. Once you know the basics, you're set. At this point, swapping to Linux has never been easier so you won't run into as many compatibility issues and whatnot like you would have a decade or so ago.

Explore. You're trying something new. There's no correct answer here. It's like picking a main in SSB. Tier levels don't mean shit if you hate who you're playing with. Figure out how to survive if you were left with only the terminal, and you'll be fine.

Most important is to know where your "stuff" is. Learn how the filesystem on your disks are built up. Try to use the terminal as there is the hidden world of linux capabilities, often commandline programs are very efficient, they save you a lot of mouse movements and clicks. Install mc to help you within the terminal.