Hijacking for my own idea: what if I wanted to make my own updated version of say, hiren’s Linux environment that included tools for data recovery and drive administration among other things. I would love to basically build my own custom recovery environment preloaded with all my favorite tools.
Tbf, with a few hours of googling, I could probably figure this out for myself so don’t go through a bunch of trouble unless you want to document for others. I’m mainly posting because I saw OP and wondered if something easy already existed?
Well if you want to make a completely independent distro you could try linux from scratch and package the distro as an ISO with the packages you want and maybe try to add a package manager if you can. However i doubt that would be worth it as linux from scratch takes a lot of time and efforts to build and will rarely be better than just building a custom arch or debian ISO