Slightly off topic, but learning Linux now days just feels like easy mode compared to when I was a kid. A lot of the inner workings of linux are now hidden from people who learn linux today.
I remember the good old days, when I was 15 and couldn't get windows 98 to stay connected to the internet all weekend for the R7 telkom dial-up fee. I briefly touched mandrake before I decided I wanted to learn linux and threw myself right into Slackware where there was no package managers or easy tools. You had to go compile everything from scratch, search the internet without google and find all the dependencies and their dependencies and there dependence and compile them all until you got a working application. Eventually moved onto Gentoo, which blew my mind with emerge and the chroot style installation where you could configure the gcc flags to optimize the compiler for your PC. Taught myself iptables to protect myself again other IRC users (# +++ATH0 ftw).
Without google, a lot of what I learned was trial and error and RTFM repeatedly.
I remember bringing down the kernel source, patching it GRSecurity and also performance patches and then compiling the kernels from scratch. Using enlightenment as a GUI when Xwindows was still around instead of Xorg, lmstats for pretty graphs on the desktop, which were useless come to think about it now.
Using linux on a daily basis as the primary OS like this is what taught me more about linux than any other source of reading. 20 years later and I still know more about linux than I do about windows.
</nostalgia>
