This reminds me of a writeup by John Carmack. Last year he did a programming retreat where he set up a OpenBSD dev environment and tried to use the base system and the included documentation as much as possible rather than using ports and WWW†. That would probably not be so nice on a Linux system.
† Anyone else here that remembers the days when man pages and Windows help files used to be referred to as online documentation? As opposed to printed manuals.