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Does anyone know if anything similar exists for Windows? Of course it would be hard due to the closed nature of it, but a similar in-deth look into Windows internals would be much appreciated for a UNIX guy like me.
What I was actually doing was learning how to apply critical thinking in the real world. Every abstraction layer removed from a subsystem tends to require increased reasoning from the user. Maybe even a little ingenuity.
LFS, Crux, and Gentoo probably changed my life in profound ways 20 years ago. At the time, I thought I was kicking the tires on desktop Linux. What I was actually doing was learning how to apply critical thinking in the real world. Every abstraction layer removed from a subsystem tends to require increased reasoning from the user. Maybe even a little ingenuity.
I'd been a Ubuntu/Mint user until then, but after spending hours knee deep in Arch's superb documentation to explain the tools I was building for LFS I've become an Arch/Manjaro man (and Debian when I'm provisioning a new VPS for something that needs LTS)
I learned so much about what makes a distro a distro from LFS.
I'd reeeeeeeally an Alpine style LFS fork that is fully built with LLVM and muslC, but we're not quite there yet.
LFS, Crux, and Gentoo probably changed my life in profound ways 20 years ago. At the time, I thought I was kicking the tires on desktop Linux. What I was actually doing was learning how to apply critical thinking in the real world. Every abstraction layer removed from a subsystem tends to require increased reasoning from the user. Maybe even a little ingenuity.
Same for me, I think I first tried Gentoo. Becoming completely obsessed how to make my system as fast and stable as possible I did the LFS tutorial. Before all that I had been using SuSE and was so frustrated how long it took to boot (~1 minute) and how cumbersome it was to build from source. On Gentoo/LFS that was just a breeze.
Does anyone know if anything similar exists for Windows? Of course it would be hard due to the closed nature of it, but a similar in-deth look into Windows internals would be much appreciated for a UNIX guy like me.
Closest you’ll likely get for that closed source operating system is “Install Windows the Arch Way”: https://christitus.com/install-windows-the-arch-linux-way/
Hard mode: try to bring up LFS on a non-x86 platform; preferably something without a standard device bus like PCI-e or USB. For example, a 68k Mac...
It would definitely be interesting to try a machine that was contemporary with the earliest Linux releases. And apparently it can run on a beefier qemu-emulated virtual machine as well.
https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/#m68k
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Better-M68k-Virtual
On the BSD side, I think NetBSD also supports m68k and vintage Macs, though I imagine something like a modern web browser would be too slow and heavyweight to run properly.