Daily drive one.

Make it your main system. Use as many native tools from that distro or BSD system as possible.

Don’t copy-paste shit blindly.

Read, understand, then type.

No dual booting or virtualization.

VMs and dual booting give you an easy reset. They encourage reinstalling over fixing issues. You’ll never learn that way.

No compatibility layers (e.g., Wine, Linuxulator on FreeBSD, Waydroid).

If you’re using non-native tech, you’re defeating the purpose of this guide.

Make this your only system.

Your only personal computing device should be the OS you’re learning.

How to Learn:

• Learn by trial.
• Learn by error.
• Learn by doing.
• Learn by creating.
• Learn by experimentation.
• Learn by failure.
• Learn by exposure.

Stop:

• Stop reading guides.
• Stop following “must-do’s” from others.
• These rarely help you learn the intricacies of your system.
• There is no “right way” to learn this. Just long, hard, grueling, labor.

Where to Start:

• Learn the basics first.
• The manpages, the wiki, the handbook, the FAQ. Official documentation is your first stop.
• Build knowledge from there.
• Use what you learn to make solutions following the standard practices of your system.
• Actively work on your system.
• Constantly push it to do what you want it to do.

TL;DR:

Make your system do what you want. To do that, you need to understand its capabilities first. Start there.