> But most of the OS code is maintained in such a way that only a small group of motivated users would be willing to fiddle with the build infrastructure necess

> But most of the OS code is maintained in such a way that only a small group of motivated users would be willing to fiddle with the build infrastructure necessary to even attempt modifying any of the core That's absolutely not my experience. On Debian distros I just grab a .deb source and can work with it in the exact same way regardless of which OS component it is. Similarly on Arch with its PKGBUILDs, and I assume other distros have something equivalent as well. I agree with the rest of the post though.