Gentoo. Literally the entire system is a build environment. Imagine a single environment that’s capable of compiling thousands of different packages and managing dependencies etc.

Funtoo is dead after this month

https://forums.funtoo.org/topic/5182-all-good-things-must-come-to-an-end/

My “main” OS timeline was:

• Apple II/C64
• MS-DOS
• OS/2
• Linux

Technically I used windows 3.1 at times in DOS and OS/2 for some specific piece of software, but it was never what I primarily used and I don’t consider Windows 3.1 a proper operating system, it’s just a desktop environment.

Not sure exactly when, but I know by 2000 I was fully on board the Linux train.

Started using Linux in the days of floppy boot and root diskettes. Lived through the days of hand-crafted SLIP scripts for dial up internet. The days of needing to pay for working sound drivers. Manually calculating modelines in Xfree86.

I have primarily used Windows at work, probably been 99% windows and 1% Unix/Linux. I have had windows laptops and virtual machines for certain specific use cases but it has never been my main.

I do it because I can… I read release notes on every update and once you’ve configured a kernel for a particular machine you really don’t need to touch the config, barring major changes like when PATA and SATA merged. Or of course if I’m adding a new piece of hardware.

I remove everything I don’t need and compiling the kernel only takes a couple minutes. I use Gentoo and approach everything on my system the same way - remove the things I don’t need to make it as minimal as possible.

Compiling your own kernel also makes it easier when you need to do a git bisect to determine when a bug was introduced to report it or try to fix it. I’ve also included kernel patches in my build years ago, but haven’t needed to do that in a long time.

I used to compile a custom kernel for my phone to enable modules/drivers that weren’t included by default by the maintainer.

It’s not about performance for me, it’s about control.

Tried Wayland about 5 years ago to see what all the hype was about, with Nvidia proprietary drivers, got a black screen. Could never get beyond that. Went back to xorg.

Tried about 3 or 4 years ago, with amdgpu drivers, no black screen this time but chrome would not work and a few other programs didn’t work right or at all. There may have been special builds or wrappers to work around some of those issues but I had no interest in dealing with that at the time, so I went back to xorg.

Have not felt motivated to try again as I haven’t had any issues with xorg. I’m using Nvidia drivers at the moment. I also heavily use turbovnc server with virtual gl and not sure how (or if) that’d work in combination with Wayland.

I haven’t had to even think about the fact I’m using xorg or screw around with the configuration in like 10 or 15 years. It just works, for me and my setup, anyway.