Linux Crack Tips

With one hand you describe your desire to explore and tinker with the inner mechanics of operating systems (or at least your desktop environment). With the other your need for an OS to work just so without your configuration.

You can't have it both ways.

Three facts which may help you if you're able to accept yourself as the limiting factor:

1. GNU/Linux freedom means, among other things, the freedom to modify. This is why distributions exist. Someone had a strong enough preference to take on the burden of constructing an alternative which met those preferences "out of the box".
2. Everything you do in any GUI is executing commands for you.
3. Everything in Linux is a file descriptor. Differing design philosophies are one of the reasons (among many) that Microsoft created the Registry for Windows. Warren Young's response to a question about this topic on Stack Exchange is nigh exhaustive and well written. This might be the lightbulb you're looking for?

My point isn't to discourage you. I think almost everyone interested in exercising their agency in computing ought to be empowered to do so. That isn't without friction and hurdles though and, at least as far as I can see, never will be.

Graphical Applications have to be built by people. Those people have to understand programming and the CLI/terminal because, again, every GUI interaction is issuing a command to the system it runs on. Not everyone knows how to do that well and those that do cannot program those applications for every concievable use-case. This is why you're often instructed to fiddle with things via commands in a terminal. No one has built a GUI tool to help you with xyz yet so users have to issue the commands directly if they want xyz.

If you want that tool to exist then you'll either have to build it yourself and share it with the world or pay someone to do that for you. This would likely be a pull request to add a feature to a program.

There is no world in which an operating system exists without a terminal, however; you might be able to help build one within which the average user never has to open one. That'd take a lot of education, hard work, and use of the terminal to accomplish and maintain.

To know what you're doing: read the manual. To take control: exercise what you learn from reading the manual.

If RTFM is too daunting a recommendation to start off with (no judgement! I get it) then start here instead: https://tldp.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/index.html

The Linux Documentation Project predates the Arch wiki (and it shows) but that has zero bearing on its utility for beginners.

I hope this helps!