Linux - Is it the way forward?

I've spent most of today compiling packages aiming to produce a bootable version of Linux From Scratch. I've downloaded the source and compile it on the machine to produce a working Linux OS (hopefully).

It's quite exciting, although I'm not sure how much I'm learning just by typing in commands from the book. Two early observations are:

• Bash is really cool. For some reason I thought that DOS was quite good, but this takes the biscuit.
• Regular expressions really aren't. I've never seen something so confusing. One day, I suppose, I might get my head round the syntax.

Meanwhile I'm still compiling away. Unfortunately, I rather suspect that the experiment will end with nothing more exciting than a blinking cursor. Oh well, it beats doing work.