My workstation OS: My own

The given point of this article seems to be that it is not so important what OS you choose for your needs, just to understand that Linux happens to have the ability to give its users the customizable options that they might not normally have with other, more restrictive OS’.

This is an unusual article in the “My workstation OS” series. It’s not about using a specific OS distribution. Indeed it’s about not using any OS distribution at all. For many years now I’ve installed my OS from the sources. Although this is not an easy nor fast way to get an OS installed, it’s the best way for getting a fully customized system that fits any individual needs and desires.

I began using Linux in 1996, before Linux enjoyed the popularity it has nowadays. You could easily name almost all the distros — Red Hat, Slackware, and Debian were the main ones, with Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE being popular names, too. A typical distribution in those years was usually shipped without many of the features we now find commonplace, such as sound support, database servers, and programming languages like PHP. If you wanted some of these installed in your system you had to download and compile the applications from the sources, which was a very common procedure.

After having compiled and installed many such packages, I started to realize how many options and optimizations you can select only at compile time. I began to collect a myriad of scripts to compile packages the way I wanted. Soon I had almost all the important packages of my system recompiled from sources.