just_another_person, 1 year ago

The major parts of any distro are just bootloader, kernel, init, shell, and package system. The filesystem isn’t “part” of the distro, it’s just an abstraction layer to work with data on the drive, and should be considered independent of the packaged distribution itself.

With the above, you can run the basics of Linux on a device. The DE is not needed, and included packages and libraries are at the discretion of the maintainers. The included choices of all the above is the only thing that differentiates each distro.

If it helps in your understanding at all, back in the day, in order to install something like Slackware, you had to build each layer of these things manually like so: format and partition disk from disk in DOS, copy bootloader to newly partitioned HDD, boot to single user mode, compile kernel, add entries to bootloader, reboot from disk to Linux kernel, open TTY, set user and shell, reboot again, compile DE, set init level and basic services, reboot to DE, and then you had a Desktop.