How a 2GB Flash Drive Led Me to Rust, Linux Internals and eBPF

A few months ago, my dad gave me his old work laptop. I was excited. A new machine to call my own. So naturally, I factory-reset the thing. Then I did something slightly more drastic: I got rid of Windows. There was just one problem. The only flash drive I had was around 2 GB, which wasn't going to be enough to put Windows back on the machine. So I started wondering: What operating system is small enough to fit on a 2 GB flash drive? Enter Arch Linux. Falling down the Arch Linux rabbit hole Getting Arch Linux running was not exactly a one-click installation. It took me about two days to get the ISO, boot from it, partition the disk, install the system, configure everything, and eventually get to something usable. And by "usable," I mean a purely terminal-based environment. No desktop environment. No polished GUI. Just a shell and a Linux system that I was now responsible for figuring out. A week later, a friend who had been using Arch longer than I had intro