> All of this is lots of fun if you're not doing for $JOB.
It seems that if you become good enough at this game you can make a good career out of knowing the ins and outs of it from what I observe…
It is. Especially if you go down the source builds and compiler optimisation rabbit hole. Before you know it, you're reading Phoronix every day for benchmarks. Next thing you're fixing your gentoo USE flags at 4:17 in the morning.
In Linux, you can download software, and learn to use it to solve a wide array of problems. You can edit files, one of life's simple pleasures. If you find yourself repeating a task, you can find ways to automate it. Doing an old task faster means you levelled up, which gets the blood flowing. You can explore vast worlds (ecosystems/code bases) and satisfy your intellectual/narrative curiosity. The game has multiplayer elements too.
All of this is lots of *fun* if you're not doing for $JOB. I'm personally addiccted to this video game, and play it hours daily.
The above is sort of a joke, but I really do feel this way. Linux+OSS is a video game.