I think the quickest way of learning it is to make something dependent on it. With newbie Linux installs, something is going to break on you, and you have to fi

I think the quickest way of learning it is to make something dependent on it. With newbie Linux installs, something is going to break on you, and you have to fix it. Whether that's flash player, a dependency hell, or messing up a critical config, something is going to go awry before you can do your normal work. Yes it takes longer, but you're learning. In the year prior to really learning Linux I had tried to install Linux in a VM, dual boot, etc. It just didn't work out because I didn't have anything to "do" in it. It could be different that you're a software engineer, but while my friends were scripting the automatic download of their torrents or piping their TV tuner through a windows VM to feed it back into mplayer, I didn't have a use case. So find your use case and force yourself to context switch OS's. I did it when my job switched me from primary Windows admin to secondary *NIX admin