Well. ACTUALLY, it's very simple you see every time you spin up a new linux box a little piece of Linus Torvold's soul get's imprinted in the CPU registers and then that fragment handles everything from there.

"It's called a shovel," said the Senior Wrangler. "I've seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical."
—Terry Pratchett: Reaper Man

It’s a series of files (tubes)!

I took an operating system class in college that involved basicly creating a baby OS. Lot of fun.

I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.

I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.

Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead....

Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.

I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.

Fresh knowledge is not to be underestimated.

On a client-server model turned single-user desktop, running on seven layers of abstraction. And the interface of choice is full of bugs and limitations. But we've got nothing better currently, that also works on the next computer, due to compatibility issues caused by misplaced secretivity of the vendors.

The more you know about computers the more you realize its just magic rocks, and that magic, rocks.

Everything's a file.

24 years exclusively running it.

Short answer: magic.

Long answer: a stressful full week trying to get everything right, followed by a long, blissful period forgetting how hard it was to get it up and running like magic.

It’s just files, how hard could it be 🤷

What I tell people: "When you get used to using an operating system that respects your rights, you don't wanna go back."