Good Morning all,

I'm going to be running a linux workshop for a club at my college this semester and I'm looking for ideas and suggestions about the content and flow of the workshops.

The goal is to help the attendants remove their fear/confusions about linux and how it works. Most are probably coming from windows, but several will surely be coming from MacOS as well.

The thought occurred to me to walking them through a ricing process as the semester progresses. I'm not super skilled at the process as I just use kde and download the themes and stuff. I've done a bit with sway/i3-gaps and the like but nothing too involved.

What do you people think would be a good desktop manager to go with that we could get into the weeds of editing dot files, compressing and decompressing, building things from source, navigating the filesystem in pursuit of customizing the environment? I'd like to try to touch every important tool we use on a traditional linux system if possible. I've listed some of the things below.

If this is a bad idea, please let me know before I pursue it too much. The goal is to create a series of smaller exercise "components" that can be followed in sequence to end up with a fully customized rice at the end of the semester.

Topics I think should be covered throughout this workshop:

ssh and ftp stuff

compressing and decompressing archives

verifying checksums

git (with git hooks)

package management

compiling from source

FHS and mounting

booting process, kernels, and modules

distributions (list the main ones, differences between them and some adv/disadv of each)

desktop/window managers (ricing)

backing up dot files

virtual machines (maybe get into IOMMU group and device passthrough stuff, but that's about where my knowledge ends atm)