Cybersecurity and “stopping hackers” are very extensive and complex topics. It’s kinda like a mix of many areas of knowledge (software, hardware, coding, internet of things, etc…)

So one advice I think I can give you is that there is a “tool” of hacking that is often overlooked: Social Engineering.

Text editors are bloat, I only use punch cards

Nice to know you’re enjoying Linux :P

I think that later on in your adventure, you’ll notice that you don’t actually need a distro that’s hard to maintain in order to do the hardcore stuff.

Going back to more tame distros (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Solus) may actually suit you better, even for said tasks.

Hmm, I personally place Nix at the same level as Arch, because I see both distros being hard to get into because of how different they do stuff when compared to the average OS.

Maybe the real level up is trying to run BSD on unsupported hardware?

I thought the “hardcorer” alternative to Arch was LFS