Re: The Microsoft stranglehold on its users....

In the past I tried making my own distribution starting from a minimal
Linux kernel setup with gcc, and compiling everything starting from
that. The source code for most of the basic utilities can be found
easily online in many places. In those days, I typically started with
a minimal setup from Slackware. There's more sophisticated ways of
doing this these days.

If I was to do it again these days, I would probably have an older
machine to do it on first. Some computer shops run by hardware type
folks, may still have some really old boards and stuff kicking around
for pennies on the dollar.

Main advantage in doing things this way, was to see exactly what each
utility program and/or script was doing. It's amazing the amount of
complexity that is "hidden" away at the lower levels. Even to get
linux to boot up directly into a shell prompt with very little else,
took quite a lot of effort to pull off.

FreeBSD has a somewhat more standardized distribution. I haven't used
it lately.

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