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I'm just curious: In what way is it rewarding? Just for educational purpose? Or anything else? Or is it just a hobby? I mean, you are probably investing a lot o

I'm just curious: In what way is it rewarding? Just for educational purpose? Or anything else? Or is it just a hobby? I mean, you are probably investing a lot of time into this. This time you could spend on other things instead. I see the educational purpose. Although you probably get similar experience/understanding/education if you use something like Gentoo and you would have to invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of.

yebyen 9y ago
> invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) that those nasty corner cases are actually where the rewarding part is. The progression of distros for me was, ZipSlack (fit on a 100MB Zip Disk), Red Hat, Mandrake, then back to Slackware once I actually had a real decent internet connection, and I can say for sure that dealing with those naturally occurring corner cases was a lot more fun than dealing with those "it's packaged, but for a different version of RedHat, so it won't work on your Mandrake install" Eventually I switched to Debian and was able to just stop caring about that stuff for the most part until something was too fresh to find a package. (I'd run Unstable, and everything was either packaged already or the vast majority of the dependencies were already packaged.) I don't know if there was any tangible reward from learning to build Enlightenment, and a full stack of graphical libraries underneath, but at least I did get Enlightenment from it. (!!)
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
It's rewarding because I finally have a Linux distro that's designed the way I want. I started making this because I wasn't satisfied with anyone else's offerings.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  What about Arch Linux?
- albertzeyer 9y ago
  Can you say what is different in your distro than in any other distro? And you think that no other distro could have been extended/fixed to get what you want? Do you consider that this is useful for anyone else? In that case, you really should publish your work and write about it.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    It is published, and you can evaluate its usefulness here: https://agunix.org/fqa https://agunix.org/fqa I'm writing up a blog post on it now, I realize I haven't done that yet.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Blog post: https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-distro.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-dis... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352

yebyen 9y ago

> invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) that those nasty corner cases are actually where the rewarding part is. The progression of distros for me was, ZipSlack (fit on a 100MB Zip Disk), Red Hat, Mandrake, then back to Slackware once I actually had a real decent internet connection, and I can say for sure that dealing with those naturally occurring corner cases was a lot more fun than dealing with those "it's packaged, but for a different version of RedHat, so it won't work on your Mandrake install" Eventually I switched to Debian and was able to just stop caring about that stuff for the most part until something was too fresh to find a package. (I'd run Unstable, and everything was either packaged already or the vast majority of the dependencies were already packaged.) I don't know if there was any tangible reward from learning to build Enlightenment, and a full stack of graphical libraries underneath, but at least I did get Enlightenment from it. (!!)

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

It's rewarding because I finally have a Linux distro that's designed the way I want. I started making this because I wasn't satisfied with anyone else's offerings.

colejohnson66 9y ago
What about Arch Linux?
albertzeyer 9y ago
Can you say what is different in your distro than in any other distro? And you think that no other distro could have been extended/fixed to get what you want? Do you consider that this is useful for anyone else? In that case, you really should publish your work and write about it.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  It is published, and you can evaluate its usefulness here: https://agunix.org/fqa https://agunix.org/fqa I'm writing up a blog post on it now, I realize I haven't done that yet.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Blog post: https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-distro.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-dis... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352