“Some days, you feel as if everything you’ve believed, for
weeks, months, years, and decades, is suddenly wrong. You are
forced to reevaluate what had been formerly held as an assumption
beyond question. This happens in little things as well as large:
when you suddenly grok a program in its entirety; or suddenly see
the pattern, the order behind a system of organisation that
formerly had been incomprehensibly vague and undefined.”
“This is part of life. We take in information, think, build
structures of thought unconsciously in our mind, and when suddenly
that structure is complete, it bursts into our consciousness and
changes everything. This feeling of completeness, of seeing the
whole of a structure, is a fundamental part of understanding Linux.
Out of chaos comes beautiful order. Vagueness turns into
flexibility. Confusion turns into choice. Argumentation and
hostility suddenly become diversity and productive conflict.”
“Comprehending the overall structure of Linux isn’t
important. That comes in time. To understand it, start with the
small things. Notice that every program keeps user-specific
configurations in that user’s home directory, and that every
program keeps global configuration files in /etc. Understanding
this is a good thing. Notice that all devices on your computer can
be referenced in /dev.“