Yep I love it. ps -ax gives you like 12 processes and the role of each is obvious and essential. The OS isn't doing anything you didn't ask it to, you can actually understand the OS. Try that on a default Ubuntu install, it's like macOS, just totally and literally out of control.
The way you describe FreeBSD is how I imagine an OS should be. I'm going to make it a goal this year to get a server up and running. Thanks.
-- Rant
Linux gives me more inferiority complex than any other technology I've ever touched.
Sure, something like a database system, or a moderately large code base or framework is complicated, and intimidating, and it might take many years to get a grip on, and understand, let alone master. But Linux? I just don't get it. I've tried for years, read books about it, etc. etc.
But in the end it's voodoo to me, and I'm always left searching for answers to problems, unable to solve them myself. The answers are always just rote step-by-step; do this and copy this command, problem solved. Why? how? nothing makes sense!!!
I always have the sense that somewhere out there is the holy bible of Linux, the missing piece of the puzzle; read this and it will all make sense.
Admittedly I've never compiled a distro. So in some respect I'm guilty of not going into the deep end. I suspect that if I learnt systems programming, and really go into the thick of it... then somewhere I might start to find my feet.
But it's easier to just believe that I'm stupid, and Linux is beyond my ability to comprehend.
Have you tried LFS? You can copy and paste, but you have to read the commands and figure out what they're doing.
This will give you an overall theoretical idea of how things are laid out - but you have to realise that every new version of something, there's some developer somewhere who wants to exercise their creativity and make something really clever and cool (to them), so it probably won't make any sense to you after the upgrade. That's the point you realise you're on the eternal treadmill of trying to keep your system doing what you need it to do, without freezing in the vulnerabilities.
I'd say the Gentoo handbook comes pretty close. You set up everything in the system and all is well explained. Not quite as extreme as LFS but enough to learn and not punish yourself.
Linux is a sprawling metropolis, you have everything and its opposite - a lot of it won't make any sense unless you learn who built what, when, and why; and you can have dirty slums right next to well-designed skyscrapers.
Trying to find meaning in such a thing is fundamentally a fool's errand.
