Gentoo is the og, “Linux from scratch” distro, where you compile everything yourself. Arch is kinda like that, except everything is compiled already. 😁

You still select all the parts of your Linux system, from the desktop environment (if any) all the way down to which initialization system you want to use. Along the way, you’ll dive into a lot of the various text files Linux uses for configuration and learn which files live where.

It’s a very thorough dive!

If you’re looking for reading material about Linux though, I don’t really have any books to recommend offhand… I will say that the basic tooling in Linux, the POSIX-standard stuff, like grep, vi, sed, and so forth remains mostly unchanged (at least in all the important ways) from year to year. Some of it has remained essentially the same since the seventies, so even a six year old book will still be able to cover all of that just fine.

The things that it would not be good for would be some of the more recent developments in, say, UI tech, like the slow, but ongoing migration from X to Wayland.

Command line scripts and config files are likely to largely be the same (though a few files have a tendency to move around depending on the distro).

Tools for administration outside of the venerable POSIX tooling is gonna be a crapshoot in book-form. Still, it’ll give you a place to start from!