It was not that easy to develop a whole (Linux) system from scratch, especially as years ago all the many details where not as documented as they are today. Bootstrapping a complete system from scratch required in-depth knowledge about the kernel, compiler and system libraries and to solve some obstacles in order to get all the toolchain and library parts correctly built together to form a functional system. That is also why most of the many Linux flavours build upon existing Debian, RedHat or SuSE distributions - just extracting the pre-built binaries and injecting a few custom files. T2 on the other hand is among the few designed from the ground up to define a system without historic cruft with the additional bonus of the automated build system to inject custom modifications as needed.

Designing a self-hosting system, one that can be used to re-build itself, is the next technical challenge.

The T2 SDE is both, designed from the grounds up with an infrastructure optimized for (cross-)compiling from package sources - as automated as possible - as well as selfhosting.

Vast amount of work was put into setting the whole infrastructure up for cross compiling to all the different CPU architectures supported.