MARICOPA COUNTY, Ariz., Oct. 24, 2026 — Coffey Labs today finished the first full build of LINUXexpert at linuxexpert.net. It now has study guides for 48 certification exams, timed practice exams for 39 of them, and hands-on lab exams for the 12 that are tested at a live command line. The site came back six days ago with ten guides. It now covers Linux, Kubernetes and cloud native, the three big clouds, GitHub, Terraform and AI tooling.
“When the guides came back, the first thing people asked for was practice that feels like the real exam,” said John Coffey, founder of Coffey Labs. “So the practice exams run like the testing center, and the lab exams run on real Linux machines, because that’s what you’ll face on exam day.”
The study guides. Each guide is written from the exam’s published objectives. It opens with an overview of the exam: its domains and their weights, the cost, the time allowed, and how the guide gets the reader ready. Every chapter explains its topic in plain words, points out what the exam tends to test, gives the reader something to try on a real system, and ends with a five-question quiz that explains each answer. Across the library that comes to about 1,700 chapters.
The practice exams. Practice exams run like the testing center. Each one has the real exam’s number of questions and time limit, with no pausing, and questions can be flagged to come back to. Every paper is a fresh draw from a pool five times the length of the exam, weighted by domain the way the real exam is, and it steers clear of questions you’ve seen lately. The pools hold more than 12,000 questions across 40 exams. When a paper ends, every answer comes back with an explanation and a list of the chapters to read next, and the score is kept so progress shows over time.
The lab exams. Twelve exams are taken hands-on, and each has a lab exam: LFCS, CKA, CKAD, CKS, CNPE and ICA; Red Hat’s RHCSA, EX294 and EX280; and Canonical’s Linux Terminal, Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop. A lab gives you your own Linux machines or Kubernetes cluster, made when you start and deleted when you finish, with a terminal in the browser. There are 13 to 25 tasks and the real exam’s time, from 90 minutes to four hours. When you finish, the machines restart before your work is marked, so a change that doesn’t survive a reboot doesn’t count, just as on the real exam. Every task comes back with its result and an explanation.
Who it is for. Anyone working toward a certification, from a first exam such as LFCA, AZ-900 or AWS Cloud Practitioner to the hands-on Kubernetes and Red Hat exams. It is written for people who work at a terminal, and every page, the exam screen included, has a dark mode. Teams can study on one bill, and their managers see who has passed what, never anyone’s scores. Members can show their passes on the leaderboard with a Credly profile, and use the same login on the Coffey Labs forum.
What it covers. Guides are open for exams from twelve providers: the Agentic AI Foundation (1), AWS (5), Canonical (3), CNCF (15), CompTIA (1), GitHub (5), Google Cloud (4), HashiCorp (1), the Linux Foundation (3), LPI (3), Microsoft Azure (4) and Red Hat (3). The full list is on linuxexpert.net.
What it costs. An account costs nothing. It includes every study guide, the chapter quizzes and one practice exam a day, with each exam at most every 48 hours. The first chapter of every guide needs no account at all. The LINUXexpert plan, $12 a month or $100 a year, raises practice to four exams a day and adds four lab exams a month. Lab exams are the only thing that needs the plan, because each one runs on machines made for that session, and the plan helps cover what they cost. Teams are $8 a seat a month or $80 a seat a year, for five seats or more.
Independent. LINUXexpert isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by any exam provider. The guides and questions are written from the published objectives and contain no real exam content. Members agree to keep real exam content confidential, and an account that shares it can be closed.
About Coffey Labs
Coffey Labs LLC is an Arizona company that builds, owns and maintains open-source infrastructure software: the inbuxa mail suite, ihasmail webmail, the ihasvpn WireGuard server, Cairn OBS log aggregation and the HotDog CMS website builder, plus the tools around them. Everything it makes runs on the user’s own hardware, is published in full under a copyleft license, and has no paid tier. Coffey Labs started in 2018 as LINUXexpert.org and was organized as an LLC in 2026. Learn more at coffeylabs.org.