I thought a more advanced distro, that is still stable, would be good overall. However, not getting new software for a long time sounds quite annoying.

Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It's pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues. It gives you the benefits that you can basically find any package in the AUR and everything is up-to-date. Try it out, if you don't like it, you can still switch to something else.

I’m wanting to challenge myself to get much better with Linux, partitioning, CLI, CLI tools

The best way to learn the CLI is to use it. Try not to use your graphical file manager for a while and only interact with the file system through the terminal, that teaches you a lot.

I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general?

Yes.

I always hear good things about the Arch Wiki.

It is truly fantastic.

Is there any other tips someone can give me, to sharpen my Linux skills?

Use the system, don't be shy, try different things out. If you are scared that you might break something, try it out in a VM. Break your VM and try to fix it. That teaches you a lot.

I was even considering trying out Gentoo on my X220, but the compiling times sound painful.

I would not recommend that, updating packages will take ages, it's not a great experience.

• Find an open-source software that you're interested in, but your main distro doesn't provide it in the official repo. Be a packager for this software.
• Open your distro's wiki, rewrite (or contribute, if already good enough) a page or section.
• Try the bleeding-edge version (or very-early testing) of your favourite distro, and submit some test results, regarding to your hardware.

IMHO these tasks are interesting, could learn a lot from these tasks, and other linux users could benefit from these work

https://linuxjourney.com/

As an alternative idea…

A using a spare desktop as a headless VM server would be a good way to practice your CLI skills. Don’t install a GUI, or web admin tool, and only use SSH to admin it.

From there, setup a couple of VMs for Arch or Gentoo testing. Eventually, a Linux From Scratch attempt would provide a lot of learning opportunities.

Try installing Gentoo. Follow their installation instructions. I was able to install it, but failed to install a DE. So, got a console going and couldn't go further. That was about 2 years ago. I have an extra laptop that I always install stuff on to learn.

This might be something for you https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/

"I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve."

I use Arch and so does my wife (she has no idea). The wiki is legendary because it is well used (I've written a few bits myself). I've used Gentoo for quite a while too but you will find compilation times a bit of a bore.

I own an IT company - I am the MD. I use Arch actually! (and so does my wife)

Installing arch is a great way to learn. Also don't be scared of daily driving it, it's not like it breaks twice a week. More like once a year, which is better than ubuntu in my experience.

I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.

Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).

I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.

Another vote for Arch. Manual Arch install was an interesting, and positive, experience. I did it multiple times so I could better understand what was actually being done. It helped me understand the boot and EFI partitions because I wanted to dual boot Windows.

For Arch itself, I've had a way snappier experience with pacman than apt and the AUR is a really convenient resource. So many packages there that you would otherwise have to build from source.

Bleeding edge packages can cause problems, but there are ways to recover. downgrade from the AUR makes downgrading packages really easy. The latest Nvidia drivers caused a bunch of problems with games for me on Wayland so I downgraded them and the Linux kernel and added them to pacman's package ignore list.

Manual arch install was one of the best experiences I had on Linux so far. You learn so much (even more when you try to compare file systems for example to find the best one for you) from the wiki. I don’t know if I’ll be switching from it haha. I’m in the same boat as you, wanting to learn it more and more, hell I’m reading How Linux Works book haha. CLI file management is nice, but I still go back to GUI a lot cos it’s easier to drag and drop to another window instead of figuring out the path to copy to. Not gonna use it just for the sake of it lol Unless someone has tips. I’m all ears :)

Installing Arch manually will teach you a lot of those things. Just do not use archinstall.

Try virtualization and containerization. Like Distrobox, running libvirt in one and a client in another. Or use ssh.

Harden your system, setup a secure ssh server for example

Arch is pretty painless on the long run, almost everything is available when you combine AUR and official. I've had some package manager issues after not using my laptop for like 6 months but I believe it more a lack for arch knowledge rather than a problem for intermediate / advanced user.

What was frustrating, like in every single imperative distro it that I feel like the system isn't clean anymore after a while and I end up reinstalling or hoping for another distro.

What I found to daily drive everything rock solid but in a funny way is NixOS, which is declarative. If you have some time and curiosity I would recommend checking how it works. No more distro hoping / installs for me

I've been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general?

Oh yes, that's exactly how I learnt. Also I have 1000+ edits in Arch Wiki, but stopped contributing to it (as well as AUR) few years ago.

What is meant by "daily driving"?

Not a joke:

Write your own device driver.

Preferably for some kind of esoteric hardware that you own but no-one else has, but it'd also be a valuable experience to do it for some commonly used piece of hardware for which good Linux drivers already exist.

For any moderately talented programmer this should be a reasonably difficult exercise, which will teach you very valuable lessons about Linux (and be quite fun at the same time).

Linux Bible 10th edition. Yes, it's for Fedora but use whatever distro you just prefer. It'll teach everything about Linux you need to know.

Alpine Linux might be good, too. It’s different. But that makes it a great exercise. See https://drewdevault.com/2021/05/06/Praise-for-Alpine-Linux.html

I agree with what other people have said about using the command line more and the gui less, that will make you have to learn about utils like find, grep, sed, and maybe awk.

Try learning vim (or emacs). Use some command like tools for stuff you'd do in the gui. Try some basic scripting for common tasks. Maybe write some short python/ruby scripts if you need them. I've found that writing code has given me a need for learning more about how the command line works, and other "power user" features.

I've found that using GitHub Copilot CLI is a neat way go improve my CLI skills.

I ask and it explains commands to me.

https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-cli