If you have a lot of time on your hands, and you like experimenting - give it a go: you'll learn a lot (and more than likely, you will also lose some hair). Ho

If you have a lot of time on your hands, and you like experimenting - give it a go: you'll learn a lot (and more than likely, you will also lose some hair). However, you can learn linux pretty darn well without ever building a system from scratch. You don't need to do that to become a "Power User" (though, for some, it helps). The thing is, a system can work in many wildly different ways: just look at the system init procedure: there's file-rc, traditional sysvinit, various paralellizations, dependancy based init, systemd, and a whole bunch of other stuff. There's also distributions which do not follow the FHS, for one reason or the other, and those work differently from the ones that do. And so on, and so forth... But anyway, if you have a lot of time, and you think it would be useful for you - go ahead. Myself, I never found it neccessary to indulge in building a system from scratch.