I said linux was fragile the other day and someone replied "in what way", this post is a good answer. In the past also I had similar critiques to my own criticism of Linux.
Who knows how many total days and weeks I spent on random things like this and all the obstacles I had to overcome. Just to get secure boot working on debian, I had to overcome their block of my vpn IP on their wiki, and the sign-tool which is impossible to find and after a lot of googling found an ubuntu post suggesting a weird kernel version speicific path that worked but the builtin vbox kernel module signing thing can't find it during apt update so at each kernel update I have to manually sign vbox modules (which means making the privkey readily available and defeating the whole point but whatever), at least I made a small script that only needs my secureboot pin/pass now. And then I decided to use apparmor, which is nicer than selinux but it took weeks to lockdown two apps and have them work and I am still not confident I did it right.
Ok,ok... let me pause there because I could go on. In my current day job, I attribute my success to two things: 1) Using linux for many years and fighting these "stupid" battles 2) I learned C which made learning a lot of other stuff a lot easier. I work in security now, so when there is a linux or container/k8s related incident it is easier for me than for my colleagues. I also don't shy away from difficult technically complex incidents or problems because I am battle-hardened in the art of figuring out seemingly random problems in topics I know nothing about with the sheer power of search engines, docs and random internet posts.
When I worked my first k8s incident, I knew nothing about it. I was watching talks by google people on one window while reading docs on another and poking around in the gke node scratching my head on why the hell a k8s node is running chromeos and everything is readonly. But all of that is a piece of cake. Try random browser crashes because weird grsec/pax patches (before they closed it off) that were messing with jit or untangling a dependency mess on a gentoo install neglected for years which doesn't even have a supported python version now. The brutality and fragility of Linux has given me a lot of mental muscles that has helped me immensly and it has forced me to be distrustful of software in general and learn a lot of stuff from programming languages to permission models, os architecture and gnu tools like sed,grep,awk and the like.
But yeah, I love linux so much but let's not pretend it is easy to use or user friendly. But hey, 2023 will be the year of the Linux desktop so we'll see.
A lot if *nix philosophy and mentality like "RTFM" and defaults not being a big deal I think are from an era where the ecosystem was much less complex and the userbase was much smaller. I attribute many of these pain points to that undying mindset.