You, like the other commenter, disregarded the core argument of the matter in favor of contrarianness for its own sake: are you trying to argue that building literally everything from source is cool and good because it's niche and weird, whereas Linux was niche and weird once but it's cool and good now? As I said, Linux had and still has clear advantages over Windows to the point that Microsoft felt threatened by it fairly soon (cue Ballmer's chair throwing, cancer remark, etc.) and tried to undermine it before giving up with Nadella. What, exactly, are the obvious and objective upsides of compiling everything from source? Many posters in the thread dispelled performance-maxxing as a meme so it can't be that. You are comparing apples to oranges here.