Ok I've heard alot in these forums about how "Linux can be fully customized" but how do you do that- through open source reprogramming? or somthin else?

It can be customized a lot more then Windows because you have more control over the operating system.

What are you trying to customize exactly?

start menues drop down menues and other simple stuff like that

Changing the start menu is different for each desktop. What are you using?

SuSE

look into customizing kde

http://www.kde.org/ for links and http://www.kde-look.org/

What about Gnome?

suse is the dist name there are several desktop env and window manager which one you use

By customizing also take into consideration the kernel. You can recompile the kernel to taylor it down to your own system. This means excluding all the unnecessary drivers. Therefore you will get a smaller and faster kernel that takes much less memory into which to load.
Secondly, in Linux you have a number of choices, no matter what are you trying to achieve. There are more than a dozen of windowmanagers, four desktop environments (kde, gnome, xfce and cde, although it's seldom used). There are number of programs that do the same thing, so choose the one you like the best. To gove an example, if you want a mail server, you can choose to run sendmail, squirellmail, qmail, etc....
-NSKL

gnomesupport.org has what appears to be a nice forum on gnome related questions.

Bonjour,
The World of Linux is full of "customizing". Since you have the entire source and pattern of the architecture, the OS can be fully modified to meet your way of free-style usage- say hard-core programming, internet gaming, multimedia or otherwise.
Thus it is great and exciting when working with Linux. It recommend your visiting RedHat Linux site and trying out the latest RH9.0 version.
june05,2003

ganesh,

welcome to linuxquestions.org

=)