Where to Learn Linux

If you’re new to Linux or if you just want to learn more about Linux and improve your professional skills, you might be wondering where to learn Linux. This article will help you.

There are many options to choose from, ranging from written content to video tutorials and audiobooks. Each category with its own different choices. We’ll go through each one of them and guide you through all the options of where to learn Linux.

1. Linux Foundation

One of the most popular options is the Linux Foundation. They’ve been supporting Linux and open source projects for decades, and they’re one of the most recognizable names in the industry. What you need to be looking at is the Training section of their website, although they offer much more than that.

There are different training paths you can go through, some of which are:

• System Administration
• Linux Kernel Development
• Cloud & Containers
• Networking
• DevOps & Site Reliability
• Blockchain
• Systems Engineering & Architecture
• Application Development
• Embedded Development

So depending on what you want to learn, you can choose a path that suits your needs.

Linux Foundation offers both free and paid courses to go through. So if you’re stuck on a budget, you can go through their free courses that go into great detail and explain everything you need to know.

One course we’d like to feature is Introduction to Linux – which is a free course offered by the Linux Foundation and recommended by Linus Torvalds himself (the creator of the Linux kernel). So this is the course you should start with if you’re a total beginner and want to learn Linux at Linux Foundation.

What makes Linux Foundation a great choice for learning Linux for beginners is that you can get certified, and the Linux Foundation certifications can greatly help you get a better job and stand out from fellow applicants. You can get the certification only, without needing to go through the training, which again, it’s really worth it because of how recognizable they and their certifications are.

There’s more information about the training paths and what you’ll learn on their website.

An alternative is CompTIA Linux+ – where you can get training and get certified.

2. Courses

Another way of learning Linux online is going through different Linux courses. There are hundreds of different courses to choose from on the popular online course websites. We’ll go into detail about them in a different article, but here are a few courses that stand out. We included one course from each website, but there are more courses to choose from on all the course websites.

Udacity – Linux Command Line Basics

Aimed towards total beginners, in this course, you’ll learn how to use the command-line interface in Linux. The course includes videos by the instructions, quizzes, and you can learn by doing the exercises, all at your own pace.

Cost: Free

Edureka – Linux Fundamentals Certification Training

Not a free course, but you get what you pay for. In this course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Linux (great for beginners) with an expert. You’ll have live online classes and get a certification at the end of the course.

Cost: $153

Use a coupon code to get a discount.

KodeKloud – Linux Certification Learning Path

On KodeKloud, you can learn about Linux from beginner to advanced topics. Learn the basics, learn shell scripts, do some Linux challenges, and get help for the Linux Foundation, LPIC, and RHCA certifications. You can even learn about DevOps. With a subscription to KodeKloud, you get access to all their content.

Cost: $25 per month

Coursera – Fundamentals of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

If you want to get into RHEL on a professional level, this is where you start. This is the best way to learn Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s an official course offered by Red Hat themselves.

Cost: Free (trial)

Udemy – Complete Linux Training Course to Get Your Dream IT Job

This is one of the most popular and top-rated Linux courses out there. It has more than 62K students with a 4.6/5.0 rating. It’s a great course to start with if you want to work with Linux professionally. This course will prepare you for RHCSA, RHCE, LFCS, and CLNP certifications.

Cost: $89.99 (get a coupon)

Pluralsight – Getting Started with Linux

A beginner’s guide to Linux. This is where you’d want to start learning if you’re a total beginner. A detailed video course at Pluralsight – one of the most popular and professional video course websites out there.

Cost: Free (trial)

We might update this course list (or publish a different article). There are so many courses to choose from, but the ones we included are some of the best.

3. Linux Websites/Blogs

There are a lot of websites focused on Linux and beginners. Most of them feature in-depth, beginner-friendly tutorials. You can go through their tutorials to learn more about Linux, explore Linux distros, and more.

If you google whatever you need help with, you’ll likely come across one of those websites. However, if you need a specific list, this list of 80 Linux Blogs and Websites will help.

Here are a few websites that stand out:

• One of the options is our website – where you can find the best distros, compare them, read tutorials, and learn more about software that runs on Linux.
• Linux Journey – Great for beginners, detailed, easy to understand and learn, and it’s all free.
• Linux Survival – learning Linux through tutorials and a terminal straight from the website.
• OverTheWire: Bandit – a game that uses tutorials and teaches you bash, so you can use ssh and bash commands to go through the game’s levels.

4. Linux Communities

Learning with a community is awesome! You can ask for help from fellow Linux users, get motivated by working together, learn from the experiences they shared, and more. You can even ask members of a community where to learn Linux.

As always, there are a lot of communities and forums to choose from, but these are the ones that stand out:

• Linux Fans Group – a popular and active Facebook group featuring 85K+ members with a lot of daily activity.
• Linux.org – one of the most popular Linux forums, featuring 45K+ members.
• LinuxQuestions.org – one of the oldest Linux forums, featuring 700K+ members and more than 6 million posts.
• Reddit communities – there are different subreddits to choose from, the most notable are /r/linux and /r/linux4noobs. The members of the latter community are really helpful and friendly.
• Distro-specific communities – if you’re using a distro and you want to learn more about the Linux distro you’re using, you can join their official forums, most distros have one. The most active are the Ubuntu Forums and Linux Mint Forums.
• Arch Wiki – although not a forum, it’s still a wiki powered by a community. It’s the most detailed and thorough wiki out there. Even though it’s the wiki for Arch Linux, which is a distro that’s generally not recommended for beginners, there’s still a lot of content on there that’s not specifically related to Arch Linux. You can use all that content to learn more about Linux.

5. YouTube, DTube and odysee

There are thousands of videos, tutorials, and courses on YouTube, DTube, and odysee. DTube and odysee are YouTube alternatives that tend to have a lot of Linux videos.

Here’s some of the content that stands out:

• Linux Essentials For Hackers playlist by HackerSploit – the channel has other tutorials and videos too, a big portion of them are related to Linux.
• Switching to Linux playlist by The Linux Experiment – the whole channel is dedicated to Linux.
• The Command Line playlist by DistroTube – again, the whole channel is dedicated to Linux.
• Ubuntu (Linux) Complete Beginner’s Guide playlist by Linux TV – they have similar playlists/tutorials for Linux Mint, and their whole channel is dedicated to Linux.
• Linux Tutorial for Beginners: Introduction to Linux Operating System video by Guru99 – it’s basically a whole course in a single two and a half hour video.
• Distro Hopping playlist by Linux For Everyone – a great playlist if you want to get familiar with different Linux distros. Their whole channel has lots more Linux videos to watch.
• Tutorials playlist by TuxDigital – a channel featuring beginner-friendly tutorials, a podcast, and more related to Linux
• ribalinux on DTube – a channel featuring various Linux-related tutorials.
• Destination Linux Network on odysee – a channel featuring podcasts and other videos related to Linux and open source
• Our channels on YouTube and DTube.

Of course, you can find pretty much anything if you search for it on YouTube. Most beginners tend to prefer video content and video tutorials over text-based tutorials, so YouTube videos and other video courses are a good choice.

6. Books

Though this article focuses on ways to learn Linux online, you can still read e-books online, and there are some great Linux books for us to avoid them over a technicality.

Some of the best books you can read to learn Linux are:

• Linux From Scratch (LFS) – a series of books where it teaches you how to build a Linux distro from scratch, step-by-step. This is one of the best, most fun, and most difficult ways of learning Linux.
• How Linux Works, 3rd Edition: What Every Superuser Should Know – one of the most popular beginner-friendly Linux books
• Linux Bible – an in-depth guide to everything you need to learn about Linux.
• Linux Pocket Guide: Essential Commands – a small book that details bash commands you need to know, categorized so you can easily find what you’re looking for. Basically, a command-line cheat sheet, great for beginners.
• The Linux Command Line – an in-depth tutorial to the Linux command line. Goes from beginners to advanced, step-by-step learning of bash.
• Linux: The Complete Reference – everything you need to know in one book.

All these links are links to e-books. If you really need a physical copy, we recommend getting How Linux Works.

There are a lot more books to choose from and a lot more that need to be mentioned, but these 6 are the best ones. We’ll feature more books in a new dedicated article to Linux books, but for now, for beginners, these 6 are great.

7. Install a Linux distro and learn as you go

You can also learn Linux by just installing a distro and learning about Linux and the distro itself as you use it. This is a great way of learning Linux by doing something and experiencing it first-hand. It can be more fun too. The best way is to use a Linux distro while you’re learning Linux through one or more of the ways we explained above.

You can start with a beginner-friendly Linux distro or start with Arch Linux, one of the more difficult Linux distros to set up and use, but you’ll arguably learn more by starting with Arch as compared to an easy-to-use, beginner-friendly distro. We have tutorials (text, screenshots + video) on how to install Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Arch Linux.

An alternative is to use a VPS – you can get one from Vultr or any other Linux cloud server provider and start using SSH/bash to play around with the server. Start configuring it, secure it, and more.

That’s about it. Of course, there are more ways of learning Linux online, so we’d like to hear your suggestions. Leave them in the comments below.

FAQs about learning Linux online

Here are some frequently asked questions (and answers) about learning Linux online

Why should I learn Linux?

Linux distros are a great option to use everywhere, including home computers and professional servers. You can learn Linux to improve your professional skills, as well as have fun or improve your home computers. There’s always an advantage to learning Linux.

How long do I need to learn Linux?

It really depends on what you want to learn. If you want to learn just how to use a beginner-friendly Linux distro, then it really takes minutes. If you want to learn a Linux skill that you can later use professionally, it takes A LOT more, just like any other skill.

Can I use Windows or Mac and still learn Linux?

Of course, all the ways of learning Linux we featured in this article are online, so you can use anything to help you learn. Although the recommended way is to use a Linux distro, just to get the full experience and to help you learn easier and faster.

What’s the best way to learn Linux?

There’s really no best way of learning Linux, it all depends on your preferences and needs. If you prefer videos, go with a video course or watch YouTube tutorials. If you prefer reading, get an ebook or use the featured websites. You get the point.

Any other questions about learning Linux? Leave them in the comments below!