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Comment by Beltiras | Hacker News Reader

Interesting metric actually. Building Windows takes 12 hours [1]. It's a bit harder to find metrics on Linux. You can build the kernel in 60 seconds apparently [2] but that is not a complete operating system.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/226377/operating-system-... [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAyNjU

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Someone's old data from 2012 to build a core-image-sato using Yocto is just over an hour - http://www.burtonini.com/blog/2012/11/15/yocto-build-times/.

That said, core-image-sato used to be just a simple demo image. In my old build system, we would build the Arago Project for a TI SoC every night and it would take a few hours but that included a lot of the DSP code as well which was really slow too. So a couple of hours on average is my guess.

Building my Linux distribution from scratch takes about an hour on a modern system from top-level ./configure && make -j5 (which produces the installer ISO image), a great deal of the time, however, is spent in first building the cross-compiler toolchain (to ensure that no matter where you build my Linux distribution you get the same results).

This is the cross-compiler toolchain, the kernel, and about 250 external packages.

Can build base+X11 BSD systems in a handful of minutes on modern hardware in one command. I don't have modern hardware, and build over NFS, so I can't give a precise figure.

But yes, windows includes lots of API's and frameworks and GUI apps and such. Probably something comparable complexity wise would be Base+X11+(1 of KDE or Gnome)..

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