Linux is a tool. And I find that the best way to learn handling a new tool is making a project with it.

A book is (maybe) fine, but a project will help you use your knoweldge while you gain it.

So set up a Lemmy/Minetest/Matrix/Teamspeak server or write a bash script to change your audio output device/volume or program a simple bot in your favorite programming language or mix some music or gather a bunch of PDFs and search through them and concatenate them

And while you do that and create directories, change permissions, move files, create users or “cat” or “grep” or “sed” stuff, find out, what every single line you write in a terminal does. And instead of using a graphical program to move files, shutdown your PC or update all programs, only use the command line.

This will help you in the long run.

I’ve seen this one recommended in the past. I think it’s great for beginners yet still full of useful information.

https://linuxjourney.com/

In addition to rhe other advice, I’d add what helped me the most: install arch from scratch.

Use an older PC you have lying around, or just a VM. Use the installation guide on the arch wiki (or a video on feetube if you prefer to listen to a human explain stuff) and just learn as you go.

https://programming.dev/c/linuxupskillchallenge always tempts me to learn something.

There’s someone posting a pretty well-crafted intro to Linux series here on Lemmy. Look for that and go to the linked website and dive into the parts that you find interesting. I think they post a course chapter per day in the format of (approximately) “Day 15: Topic for that day.”

I’ve skimmed some of the course material and thought it useful for beginners. I’m really happy that they keep posting each month.

• Ctrl-C will not do what you expect, use Ctrl-Shift-C, or click mouse wheel
• There are many better terminal emulators that XTerm
• If you accidentally press Ctrl-Alt-F1, you can press Alt-F7 to switch back to the graphical desktop
• There are in fact many ways to exit vi, no need to reboot your PC
• There’s no need to suffer through The True Commandline Experience For Real Fedora-Wearing Sysadmins⁽¹⁾, just install mc and get all the benefits without typing cd and ls every time you want to find a specific file

⁽¹⁾ Real Fedora-Wearing Sysadmins don’t use vi to edit files, they either write a sed script or use cat to copy the file to the terminal, then use cat again to copy the contents of the terminal back into the file by clicking the mouse wheel while typing manually the lines they need to change.

There’s a book called “How Linux works” and I think you might find a lot of good info there.

And at a glance, this Bash tutorial looks pretty good: bash scripting course

I think, as a Linux beginner also (~10 months), the best way to learn the terminal is to figure out what tools are useful to you and then read the manual pages or [application name] --help (if the application supports that command). Learning how to use grep will also be really helpful for troubleshooting, since sifting through logs is such a pain.

Like if you want to download a YouTube video, install yt-dlp and then type man yt-dlp into your terminal to learn about how that tool works. You can do this for basic utilities too, like cp, dd, mv, etc. and other applications you have installed. You can also use yt-dlp --help but that won’t open in the parser, just the terminal. Learn by doing things that are relevant to you and branch out from there.

There are also applications that will let you read the manual pages outside of a terminal, like xman, if you find that useful. After a certain point, you’ll be able to write commands with switches/arguments without needing to check what they mean first.

I think you need like a project that will give you a goal and things to look up to do specific things. What got me into Linux was running a minecraft realm, then we hit limitations on the service so opted for a server instead which lead down the road to a VPS and had me using Linux and commands

https://linuxcommand.org/

best way: try to use it for daily tasks. Copying and moving files? terminal, moving around? terminal, editing text? vim. Etc etc. Eventually you will learn to use it.

Also check out RobetrsElderSoftware’s “[command] is my favorite Linux command” shorts to find out new commands. Also install tldr (sudo apt install tldr on mint, sudo pacman -S tldr on Arch & derivatives) it’s very helpful when you want more (and better formatted) info than [command] --help but less than man [command]

Step one: Find terminal that’s convenient for you. For me it’s yakuake and some use a runner or whatever.

Step 2: Find stuff that you do on a regular basis with your computer and do it with the terminal instead. (Open 3 programs, run a steam game or whatever)

Step 3: Use a bashrc file to make an alias for it.

Step 4: Find stuff a couple of actions you do the same way every time like open 3 work programs, start torrent + vpn or whatever and put them in a bash function inside bashrc.

You might not need it though. The terminal is has mostly only two uses in my opinion. Automate stuff and/or do stuff you can’t do with the UI. I use the terminal heavily for work (programming) but hardly otherwise because the best way to break my OS is to change some OS config with terminal commands lol

I have a list of learning resources for CLI tools and scripting here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli_scripting.html

I’ve also written a few TUI interactive apps to practice text processing commands like grep, sed, awk, coreutils, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps

Another resource https://ryanstutorials.net/linuxtutorial/

I have been using terminal almost exclusively for about a decade or more. But, when I started I just decided to do it. And that meant that every time I wanted to do something, it would take me forever because I would have to look it up. Eventually, I got faster and faster and now anything I want to do with a gui, I can almost certainly do faster with terminal.