Some of us just like to do it ourselves. There's something uniquely satisfying about selecting every component in a system. It allows you to balance the exact price/performance trade-off that suits you best. Do-it-yourself is also one of the best ways to ensure that you have a system that won't become obsolete within six months. For example, most AMD64 motherboards support only 4GB of RAM, but our favorite board supports up to 8GB of RAM. We may never upgrade it to the full 8GB, but it's nice to have that room for expansion. You may not get that kind of room for expansion with a pre-made system.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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