Working on your own projects first, even if they're small things and not likely to be used by other people, could be an easier way to learn the basics. Building things from scratch can be easier than trying to understand someone else's code.

The using git, installing things on Linux, and co-ordinating with people already on the project were the parts of the learning curve that I still struggled with after learning programming in college. If you have any friends who do open source, maybe ask them to help you get set up to work on the same project? For the technical difficulties, I had to just keep googling and trying other things until I figured it out, in a lot of cases. It took a lot of patience to do it that way.