Ideally the source is readable, though reality falls short of that for most projects. For example, I didn’t realize I liked C until Redis. Now I’ve found a han

Ideally the source is readable, though reality falls short of that for most projects. For example, I didn’t realize I liked C until Redis. Now I’ve found a handful of C programs that I’d put into the “readable by non-C devs” bucket, like i3 and the suckless collection. Most build tools also are a disaster from the perspective of giving end users agency over their software. Automake, make, etc are often cryptic magic to non-practitioners. Like C, they can be made readable but most aren’t. KISS Linux falls into this bucket of “grokable” as well, it’s minimal and the process of going from source to distribution is easy to understand. Many stock distributions are so complicated I don’t think the average tech-savvy human has any hope of truly understanding what their system is doing in a single lifetime.