awesome VS kiss

Try this list https://github.com/firasuke/awesome

Stuff like Business Card Linux might be worth a look. There's some useful links here

Other projects that could be worth a look are Kiss, Crux, Exherbo & Void...there's a few other pointers in this list.

Gentoo's quite a complex beast, you could look at simpler stuff with code a single human has a chance of understanding. mkroot, Kiss, Glaucus, Sta.li, few more here

If you are interested in the nuts an bolts of operating systems there's a nice list of interesting projects here.

https://github.com/firasuke/awesome (last updated yesterday)

If you search on this link there are a few attempts to use the linux kernel with a bsd userland.

Glaucus is another one man project, his Github site has a lot of good info and links to other awesome projects

For something that's more of a prepackaged build-your-own-Linux kit, KISS Linux[0] is also interesting. It's kind of a microdistro with minimal abstraction over the raw guts, and "packages" are just pre-downloaded source code repos that you compile yourself.

The "package manager" is just a shell script. The installation process[1] is entirely manual, so you control every step as you bootstrap up to building your own kernel and installing each subsystem all the way up to compiling and running Firefox. It's pretty neat.

[0] https://kisslinux.org/

[1] https://kisslinux.org/install

kiss with kiss-xorg, nsxiv, st, dmenu with script, tewi, fet.sh

kisslinux.org

A good Bash code to read is some projects from GH user dylanaraps a creator of neofetch and KISS Linux (kiss is a package manager written in POSIX sh) another repo to explore is bashbox (forked from dylanaraps/bareutils) A coreutils written in pure bash.

See KISS for examples - this is a real desktop system used by some people (including me... hopefully)