(snip, part about open-source)
Personally, I'm just filled with a deep respect for those who can work with this shit well from reading Linux From Scratch.
I run a Linux Mint machine as a HTPC, and that thing does everything I want to (play movies, browse the web, be a remote download proxy), apart from run fsck automatically. The open-source part doesn't matter to me. I just want a thing that works. I would've gone for Windows, but that actually costs money and my parents are cheapskates. Like, apart from that time I botched an update from 19.xx to 20.xx (which was a shitshow), it's been very reliable.
But that's a non-technical user's perspective; all an OS has to do for me is to be a bootloader for Firefox. I don't care about the details, I just want things to work.
I'm going on a tangent here, but I like thinking of this as the "illusion" that all things that you use have. Once you push it too far, start breaking things, that illusion vanishes. When a house is decrepit, falling apart, the illusion that it's a home that people live in breaks. When something goes wrong in (more user-friendly distros of) Linux, the illusion that it is a user-friendly OS vanishes. You see its inner workings. You see the cold, dead terminal telling you that something's gone wrong. You see it for what it really is. Busybox. initramfs. The Linux kernel.
And that's the thing. Most people don't like seeing their illusions break in front of them. Do you want to see a command prompt telling you to "run fsck MANUALLY", or a cold, grey-and-black text screen that vital system components are corrupted? Personally, I can handle a bit of illusion-breaking, but I'd rather be able to have them reconstructed with a simple command.
I dunno, there's an uncanniness to a broken illusion. I suppose that reading Linux From Scratch broke it harder, as if my time with Linux hasn't broken it already. I dunno, is it horror? Is it fascination, that all these things Linux can do can be reduced to some set of packages? Like, even sudo isn't actually necessary for Linux to work. First command you learn using Linux, and that's not even needed. You don't even need a package manager, strictly speaking. You could just literally just memorize every package you've installed, and that's a perfectly valid strategy. There's all sorts of things you don't actually need for Linux.
And I suppose those are my thoughts on Linux From Scratch. Spooky, yet fascinating. Can this go in the book thread?