Comment by arp242

There's an old presentation from late 90s or early 2000s where Linus talks a bit about the origins of Linux, how much he hated working with OpenVMS at university, and how much of a breath of fresh air Unix was. The reason he liked Unix so much was that "you could understand the whole system. Maybe you don't know exactly how the startup system works right now, but if you need to know then you just go in there and figure it out".

This fairly accurately describes why I generally prefer systems like Void (including for my daily desktop). Alpine has a similar experience (although I hate OpenRC), as do the BSD systems (mostly; there's some ridiculous historical complexity here).