Hello, I got almost for free a Lenovo laptop: CPU Intel i3 8130, 4Gb RAM. I would like to use It to learn Linux. I saw some people using Arch to learn the inside out of Linux, but I’m afraid It could be to challenging. What do you suggest? What Is the best way to learn? Thank you. Edit: First of all I thank you all for your suggestions, I think that this is what makes this community special. I installed Fedora Xfce for now and I worked all evening to male it work and customize it. I’m learning a lot already. I’ll move to Arch as soon I’ll feel comfortable with Fedora. Thank you all again.
I would say that Arch is not the best distro to learn the ins and outs of Linux. Arch is comparable to Void in that both are rolling-release distributions and require comfort with the command line.
Gentoo goes a step further by allowing you to tweak CPU-specific and software compile-time options before building packages from source. Then you have PLD Linux, whose installation process demands a strong understanding of the system and its internals.
A step further down is CRUX, which leaves you with the bare essentials - essentially just the kernel. You need to manage repositories yourself to a significant extent.
Finally, we arrive at Linux From Scratch (LFS), which is somewhat similar to CRUX, but with an even more hands-on approach. With LFS, you must manually install virtually everything, including the toolchain, libraries, and basic utilities.
So, from Arch to LFS, there’s still a huge gap in terms of how deeply you engage with the system.
Finally, what does it really mean to “learn Linux”? You can learn Linux with any distro, but when you are using a distro, you are mostly just learning that particular distro.