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Originally Posted by mellamo
In response to the suggestions to use something very newbie friendly, my concern is that something that is set up out of the box will not teach me a lot since its mostly ready to go.
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I dislike the term "newbie friendly", both because it's looking at things from the wrong angle and gives the wrong impression. With some tools, being suitable for new/inexperienced users can reduce the usefulness for advanced users, but that isn't really the case with Linux-based OSes.
In addition, it's good to have a system that is simply
ready to go, so you don't get frustrated when you just want something to work, and find yourself being forced to spend time
yak shaving before you can get to the task you want to be doing.
There's also
plenty of general things to learn irrespective of which distro you use - having an already working system is not a hindrance to learning. But to be clear I'm not suggesting you can't
also have a separately installed distro that you build/customize yourself, and/or one you can trash and re-install on a whim. (Deliberately breaking and fixing things can be a good way for some people to learn, but again, better to do on a non-essential system.)
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Also, I want to work on customizing my distro for privacy and security... it seemed like Arch was the way to go for that. If anyone has a better suggestion that would allow me to work towards those goals please let me know.
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If those are your priorities, I would recommend a non-systemd distro, because
systemd reduces security and privacy.
If you're really set on Arch, then
Artix is Arch without systemd, but otherwise
Gentoo and
Slackware are both commonly listed (alongside Arch) as "advanced distros" (e.g. see
DistroWatch Major Distributions).
(I personally use
Devuan - Debian without systemd - but there's
plenty of options.)
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Regarding uname -boughtonp, I read the manual page regarding this. I understand why date command is not an issue regarding time zone (it is standardized due to the -u command). Am I not getting the correct machine and os inform uname because I'm running it from Bash instead of an installed linux command line?
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It's not because you're running it from Bash, but because you're running it on a non-Linux-based system, i.e. either MinGW or MSys2 (whatever Git for Windows calls what it uses to provide GNU tools these days) on Windows. i.e. If you enter "uname" on its own and you'll get something like "MINGW64_NT-6.1" instead of "Linux".
Understanding shell commands is definitely something you'll be learning if you're more than just a casual user...
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Or, is it because I did not know to break the first part of the code from the second part at |sha224sum|sed 's/\W//g' ?
Also - I'm reading about echo and trying to figure out how it works. I understand it is a text display command, but I don't understand the output it produces. Any hints on what direction to research.
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Yes, learning Bash is a good place to start - particularly piping (the "|" bit) and redirections (stdin/stdout/stderr), but the first three chapters of the
GNU Bash Reference Manual has a lot of info.
BashFAQ is also a good resource, and
ShellCheck a useful tool for identifying bugs.
If you're going to be customizing any distro you'll spend plenty of time on the shell (may be Bash, may be another), so the sooner you're familiar with at least the basics then the more productive you can be.