I just stumbled on this forum and find it very interesting. I have been using OS X as my main operating system for the past three years after moving to it from Windows. I have found this transition of moving from Windows absolutely blissful. I really realised how much interesting unix is and how one can do some really amazing things with the utilities already provided by the system.

However I am really interested in really getting to know more on how everything operates 'under the hood' so to speak so I was looking for a way to really understand that. Reading about it from books can be insightful but I really think unless you really try and play around and understand everything, you won't really fully understand it. I think. So my question is, can you guys recommend me the best way to really get into open source distributions, how they work and what you can do with them. I will probably run these operating systems in a virtual machine on my OS X since I currently don't have a secondary laptop nearby me right now.

I was thinking of ether trying out Linux from Scratch and going through that, or going and setting up arch linux or perhaps go straight to gentoo and try to configure it as my first open source distribution. I also heard about Crux distribution from here but I think it might be a bit too complicated for the first timer like me. What do think?