[obviouslygreen]

Yeah... poorly phrased. I understand that there's more than a kernel and a shell; I started with Gentoo and worked quite a bit with RedHat/CentOS/Fedora before moving to Ubuntu and then to Debian.

The point was that what you get without selecting or installing anything else via a package manager is still apparently far less than what you get with a "base install" from a BSD (at least according to the article) and that that starting point is what I'm used to.

[justincormack]

Gentoo is probably the most similar, as it has enough to bootstrap the system in the base (stage3), which is not surprising as it was modelled on BSD ports to a large extent. Although the BSDs will also include a debugger too. Linuxes generally got pretty hard to bootstrap reliably though, nad had binary packages earlier, which was where things diverged in base systems.

NetBSD takes bootstrapping most seriously - you can cross build it on any system with a vaguely functional C compiler, and it will bootstrap completely.