Absolutely. Plus I think I've gained a significant chunk of my understanding-a-new-system and debugging skills from growing up fiddling with Gentoo, Linux From

Absolutely. Plus I think I've gained a significant chunk of my understanding-a-new-system and debugging skills from growing up fiddling with Gentoo, Linux From Scratch and what not. Now I make my money from these skills. In this day and age I'd argue a major Linux distribution is generally less hassle to get started and work with than macOS or Windows, but it's still good to know that if anything _really_ bothers me, I _can_ change it to be any way I like.