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What types of low-level things did you want to learn? A lot of what seem low-level in Linux are implementation-specific things. For example, how you set up wif

by nequo 4y ago

What types of low-level things did you want to learn? A lot of what seem low-level in Linux are implementation-specific things. For example, how you set up wifi or how you manage your firewall. Knowledge of these things gives you less long-lived and less transferable skills than knowledge of protocols like TCP/IP which is shared by everything that is plugged to the internet. It doesn't make you a better programmer, unless these daemons and tools are what you want to write software for. Also, your options are not only Arch Linux and Windows/Mac. There are more desktop-ready distributions, too, like Ubuntu or Fedora. Linux lets you still inspect the plumbing if you install one of those.

markus_zhang 4y ago
> What types of low-level things did you want to learn? To be honest, I've dabbed in a lot of low level stuffs but never went deep enough to make any impact, career-wise at least. For example I completed a full course on MCU programming, completed the first half of nand2tetris, read the first few hundreds of pages of "Beginner Reverse Engineering" (basically the part that teaches one to recognize C from decompiled assembly code), and many others. My most recent low level adventure was the book "Practical Binary Analysis" which I planned to use the whole holiday to push maybe a few chapters. But I never drilled deep enough into any of the topics. I believe I have the brain to drill at least a few more chapters deeper for any of them, but I don't have the mental power to do it. I secretly want someone to put me into some sort of prison and keep me from getting out until I completed all previous projects and learnings. But of course I need to figure out a way to deal with the problem. Anyway, really appreciate your answer, and probably I'll still install Archlinux, play with it a few days and then lose interest -- just another failed project to spend time.

by nequo 4y ago

markus_zhang 4y ago

> What types of low-level things did you want to learn? To be honest, I've dabbed in a lot of low level stuffs but never went deep enough to make any impact, career-wise at least. For example I completed a full course on MCU programming, completed the first half of nand2tetris, read the first few hundreds of pages of "Beginner Reverse Engineering" (basically the part that teaches one to recognize C from decompiled assembly code), and many others. My most recent low level adventure was the book "Practical Binary Analysis" which I planned to use the whole holiday to push maybe a few chapters. But I never drilled deep enough into any of the topics. I believe I have the brain to drill at least a few more chapters deeper for any of them, but I don't have the mental power to do it. I secretly want someone to put me into some sort of prison and keep me from getting out until I completed all previous projects and learnings. But of course I need to figure out a way to deal with the problem. Anyway, really appreciate your answer, and probably I'll still install Archlinux, play with it a few days and then lose interest -- just another failed project to spend time.