[IanChiles]

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.

[lmm]

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

[IanChiles]

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.

[lmm]

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.

[IgorPartola]

Why not try Linux From Scratch?

[TallGuyShort]

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."

[phren0logy]

What are your thoughts on Arch?

[IanChiles]

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.

[vezzy-fnord]

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.