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Comment by ivanbrussik | Hacker News Reader

I applaud his efforts - but how is it so many people find main stream Linux distros that non-configurable that they need to create their own?

I mean, even distros like Ubuntu are highly configurable. You can kill off as many packages as you want and even compile your own kernel if you really want to.

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Thanks! There's no problem with them not being configurable enough, the problem is with understanding how they work behind the scenes. The best way, IMHO, to address this, is by starting from nothing, and building it from the ground up - not just compiling things, but writing basic replacements for things like bash, init, etc. Along the way, this gives me room to try new ideas out on a much lower level - rather than just trying to hack them into Ubuntu/another distro.

What are your thoughts on Arch?

Arch is my distro of choice at the moment - but even it simply teaches how to copy/paste to make things work, never explaining what is happening when you run a command, or how it manages to do that.

How about Slackware? Personally I find it unjust how rarely Slack is mentioned nowadays compared to distros like Arch and Gentoo. From the conservative development, the BSD-style init system and minimalistic package management, I've always found it to be the most UNIX-like distro of all, and my personal choice.

In that case wouldn't you be better off with something like Minix that's designed for this?

Well, I'm much more interested in the state of the Userland, not the Kernel itself. And since Linux is the de-facto FOSS Kernel, it makes sense to base it around that, instead of trying to port the various compilers/tools that I've used to Minix. It's just easier to do on Linux, but I've tried using the FreeBSD Kernel, as well as XNU - both ended pretty horribly, so I'm sticking with Linux for the time being.

Minix comes with its own unix-compatible userland. It won't be as performant or featureful as the GNU versions, because it's designed for teaching - but I would've thought that would be what you'd want.

Why not try Linux From Scratch?

From the article: "LFS, despite how amazing it is, teaches very little about the inner workings of Linux and emphasizes copying and pasting to compile a Linux distro."

Honestly it is probably because there is some annoyance or another which comes down to the philosophy of whichever distro you are using.

Here are my slight annoyances:

ArchLinux: got more opinionated see /usr/bin and python3 in recent history, breaks a lot for a distro

Linux Mint: Broke firefox forced google custom search then DDG

Ubuntu: Unity Mir

Debian: Slow moving, long freezes in packages

Fedora: I don't need SELinux on my desktop box, font rendering (don't like infinality)

Opensuse: Need to use OBS to get packages that probably should be in a main repo

That being said I've never been that annoyed with any of the Distributions to actually go and build one.

I used arch linux for many years but after python3 broke everything I left for ubuntu 10.04 then after that went up I tried unity but didn't really like that, but I stuck with it until ubuntugnome was an official thing.

Right now Debian Wheezy on desktop, Ubuntu Gnome laptop, and both seem to work well enough. I've lost my want to customize my OS so much anymore since I'm not on arch linux and it becomes a little harder when you don't have something as easy to use as the arch build system.

Every distro I've tried has something that annoys me about it too. And this is why I keep coming back to Slackware: it's the distro that annoys me the least. It's also Linux in its rawest and least dilute form, a natural step up from LFS: you can edit config files and use standard Unix commands confident in the knowledge that the package system and distro tools won't clobber anything you don't expressly tell them to.

Whats wrong with FreeBSD?

Laptops.

I think it's a natural part of the learning process. Either abstract away (usually with leaky abstractions) or simplify by rewriting (usually with the same result once the complexity of the domain is factored in). In some cases it produces something better but usually not on the first iteration.

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