Is it possible to make money using your Linux knowledge if you’re not a developer? I know I can become a professional devops or sysadmin if I take some courses and master advanced networking. But is there something I can do now as an average, moderately experienced linux user?

  • I’m sure someone will correct me but I believe 90% of professional Linux is done at a commandline, DEs are mostly for personal use

    It’s a useful skill to have for a number of different jobs but usually not the primary one as most techies have some working Linux knowledge anyway

    Developers, pentesters, system architects and similar

  • Typical onboarding scenario is to start at low level and climb up. Apply for helpdesk positions in companies with linux infrastructure. But the game is currently moving towards devops, so I would suggest you add some knowledge like ansible and terraform in your repertoire.

  • If you like teaching/training that could be an avenue to make money with some of that knowledge.

    You would need to consolidate that knowledge and show that you have a good enough understanding of that topic to teach it but it’s a pretty good way to learn more and make some money along the way.

    Not every training needs to be kernel level types of expertise, a lot of people train on the basics of Linux and could use some training. For instance many business will send admins that are knowledgeable on Windows to learn also on Linux so they can do both at the same time.

  • I mean even with devops or sysadmin you usually want to write scripts that take care of deployment, automated tests or various housekeeping chores that are to time intensive or error prone when done manually. So it really hangs on how much of a “non-coder” you consider yourself as.

    I mean scripts as in a block of code that when activated terminates on its own, they can get quite large and arbitrarily complex particularly when interacting with several different components.

  • For example you could do website hosting? Set up limits for each customer directory, configure PHP and Apache and sell space + bandwidth packages.

    The price per month got pretty high recently, and it might be interesting to position a company as “for the long term” (the big providers all hide their true monthly cost behind an introductory period, so you would have to swap every 2 years to get the best price)