Learning more about how Linux actually works

[Retro6]

I've spent many years using Linux and trying out many different Linux Distros but I never really dug deep enough to find out how they actually work...

From what I currently understand you have the Boot Loader and then a kernel which I'm assuming are the foundations of a Linux OS like DOS on Windows and then you have a terminal plus a desktop environment and its got me wondering about building my own Linux Distro using an existing bootloader & kernel or even bringing back one of the older Distros like GOS which was Ubuntu based and was around in 2008/09 I quite liked that although it would be horribly outdated now. I thought maybe doing an experiment using an old desktop environment but with a modern kernel and security updates with the ability to run modern browsers and Linux applications.

The only thing I currently know about Linux kernels are that older kernels don't support SSD drives. What is a kernel and what does it do exactly?

I would be interested in learning more about a Linux OS from the ground up.

 

[Throrik]

If you want to properly understand things I would highly recommend a LFS Project - you'll build and compile pretty much everything from scratch and piece it together.

LFS Project Homepage

A big difference from 2008/2009 era distros was the init system, most mainstream distros now use SystemD, whereas back then it was lots of sysvinit. You can run older environments, most of them have some kind of maintained fork, most of them have been updated and most of them can still be built, you'll just have to deal with any dependencies.