Which OS has the steep learning curve and is considered hardest?
- Gentoo ( I have been using it for 3 years now, until I have to switch to Ubuntu for research sake. I love it’s philosophy and I kinda feel even my lifestyle changed after Gentoo. Tried it’s successors, redstar, cosmic mod didn’t liked much.)
- Arch Linux ( when I got into Linux, everyone was like, I use arch btw. So tried it first with gnome, then kde, then i3, then i3 gaps and tui, then used openrc, then used runit. Helped me lot to install Gentoo. But Gentoo transformed me into something else)
- Nix OS ( I was hearing about it since 2022. I wanted to try, and now I am gonna install and use it. I’m planning)
My question is, which among these is considered to be hardest and thus by mastering it, one can master linux to atleast some part? (excluding network management, ofsec, netsec, forensics, etc)
It does not matter which distribution you use. For example, I am using Arch for over 10 years. Have I gained any new knowledge since then? Sure. But not because I use Arch but because I had to do certain tasks. Or because I was interested in certain things. I even go so far as to say that I got a lot of my Linux knowledge under Mandrake / Mandriva (comparable to Ubuntu) because that was the distribution I used initially.
From my point of view, it is therefore only important that you want to learn something. Whether you use Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Arch or Gentoo for this is basically irrelevant.
Apart from that, I don’t think Arch is a difficult distribution to install or use. For example, many of the commands in the official installation guide can be executed without any changes. Or if you want to make it even easier, just use archinstall which has been an official part of the iso file for some time.
As for maintaining Arch, I’ve been doing exactly two things for years.
Before an update, I check if anything has been released at https://archlinux.org/news/ that affects my installations (this can be automated with tools like informant). It is important to follow these instructions.
And from time to time I synchronize my configuration files with the Pacnew files. There are tools for this as well (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#Managing_.pac*_files).
In other words, just use the distribution that suits you and learn what you need. Learning things on spec that you may never need is useless in my opinion.