I don't know why but the easy way never appeals to me. I like learning new stuff, and the DIY spirit is strong within me, lol. In the late 90's, early 2000's I was working for an old-school tech company that was still using Unix on all their engineering work stations. They finally switched to Windows around 2001/2002, and I hadn't played with CLI operating systems until I started hanging out here with you nerds. Pounding out commands on the keyboard took some adjustment, but like I said, I find it fun and enlightening. There's really no better way to learn about the technology of bitcoin than to dive into it. And it's quite rewarding when you get things working well.
I spent most of the day yesterday trying to install mempool.space on an Ubuntu server, and kept running to obstacles. I'll figure it out eventually, but it can be frustrating.
You and @NeuroticFish [
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5362554.0 ] trying to do things the hard way :-)
My view, so take it as you will. If you have enough spare hardware to do a node in a box on a RPi or similar or if you have enough spare drive space to do a virtualbox version of one of them start with that.
You then can see what works, although in a VERY customized environment.
Then you can try to do your own, and if you get stuck can ask for help AND you can take an actual look at something that works and track backwards from there.
Sometimes you just need to look at a working setup configuration to get see what has to be done.
And since you know what works, you can see what you can do to break it, and and then revert to the old running config that worked.
-Dave