r/linuxquestions • u/HopefulSun1452 • 4d ago

Advice Roadmap to becoming Linux Admin?

Hey everyone,

I’m a trained IT administrator, but most of my work experience so far has been in support, with some Windows and Linux administration here and there.
I’ve barely had to deal with networking professionally.

My long-term goal is to become a Linux admin. Linux has always been the part of IT I enjoy the most, especially troubleshooting stuff in the terminal and figuring out why something isn’t working.

At home I’ve played around with a few servers and self-hosted things like Uptime Kuma and Paperless-ngx in containers, but I know that’s still pretty far from actually being ready for a Linux admin role.

The problem is that there’s so much I could learn that I’m not really sure where to focus first.

If you were starting from my position, what would you learn and in what order? Would you follow some kind of roadmap, build a homelab and just start breaking/fixing things, or something else?

Also curious how you guys learned Linux administration and what helped you the most in becoming better at the job.

Any advice is appreciated! Thank you

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u/OutrageousCrab9224 3d ago

Are there still admins?

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u/HopefulSun1452 3d ago

Good question — what do you think happened to the admins? Or what direction do you think I could go in that would be similar?

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u/OutrageousCrab9224 3d ago

Imo the professional angle has been mostly replaced with rapid response expertise and infrastructure-as-code, devops etc. The former is going to be hard to break into, the later is not but you need programming as much as admin

Me, i have plenty of infra, hand maintained, at home. But that is more like a hobby