(09-06-2016, 12:38 PM)venam Wrote: Talking/writing won't lead you nowhere, it's getting your hands dirty that will.

Yup. Even more so, I'm convinced that, in order actually learn something, you have to properly install a system and use it on a daily basis. A VM is nice for a quick look, but you'll miss a lot of things.

Or, let me rephrase. It's very hard to get to know a system by "looking at it". You learn a lot more when you're facing real problems. Actually, learning is more of a side-effect, really.

For example: You want to get some program running. In order to do that you need to edit /etc/environment. Okay, you do that and your program runs fine. The next day, you SSH into your machine and you notice that your program does not run anymore. Why? You eventually discover that /etc/environment is being read by PAM, you learn a little bit about PAM configuration, and finally you notice that (on your distribution) PAM only reads /etc/environment on "local" logins, but not when logged in via SSH.

So, you learned a great deal about PAM. But, initially, you never intended to look at PAM at all.

Stuff like that only happens when you use something on a daily basis and over a longer period of time.