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)

  • @kolorafa
    8•2 years ago

    From the list … I would go with:

    Arch Linux - if you want to learn how to partition you drive, setup bootloader, manage packages from terminal, setup EFI, and such, probably tasks that will help you for example in cases when windows would override bootlaoder/efi and you want to recover/fix your Linux OS without reinstall, or you broken it and you want to fix it.

    Nix OS - if you want to learn how to serialize your OS to an reproducible state with later ways to use Nix packages on other distros if needed. If you break it, you will just revert to older revision or reinstall everything in a matter of minutes (if not seconds) from few files. You will learn way different set of skills than Arch as you will only ‘define’ what you want your partition and bootloader should look, and NixOS will take care of that almost magically, but you could use Nix packages on top of Arch or any other distro.

    Gentoo - if you want to learn how all those packages are build and installed from sources, how to patch and modify them when needed, how much time you gain with distro with prebuild packages if you decide to build everything, but on the other hand how much performance you ‘could’ gain from optimized builds or how easy is to install anything you want in any way you want. (Didn’t use Gentoo myself, as installing stuff from AUR on my desktop Arch is all I need to experience how much time it could take :) So Gentoo would probably not be the hardest but most time consuming, but I could be wrong)