Embrace the Pain

I have not explored the caverns of hardcore Linux yet. But it crosses my mind every now and then. I happen to have an old laptop with a broken screen. I could hook it up to a monitor. And I could put Arch on it. Or Slackware. Or Gentoo.

I could definitely use the experience. I would be forced to become intimately familiar with the inner workings of Linux. I have *sort of* done this in the past. When I hit the network setup wall, plugged in my network cable, and hit the network set up wall again.... and again. I decided I didn't really want to be a Linux guru.

Snce then I've had to do some digging and debugging on my new laptop. So maybe now I know enough to struggle through the process. If you haven't looked into advanced Linux distros before, here's a couple suggestions culled from various distro reviews:

Arch Linux
https://www.archlinux.org

Debian
https://www.debian.org/

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

Fedora
https://getfedora.org/

Gentoo
https://www.gentoo.org/