I tried it. Lot of fun and fustration. If You hava spare machine and few weeks to play around, do it. It boosted my knowledge and my skills a lot. I would not use it for daily driver, and never for work.

Documentation is super! If You have to do something by hand, it is one of the best source of info!

I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.

It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.

I did it, learned a lot. But it’s not really a system that can be maintained very easily. You don’t even have a package manager. :)

I’ve done it before. It’s not particularly difficult, just very time consuming. And at the end, you’re left with a distribution that’s not really that useful without repackaging everything you did into a package manager so you can do updates without borking it.

Great as a learning tool to see how the whole GNU/Linux stack works, but not something you’d use practically.

Did it for shits and giggles once back in 2006. I think everyone serious about learning Linux at a “pro” level should go through the process at least once, even if the system gets wiped afterward in favor of a more usable distro. Teaches you what the standardized core components are and what they do, and gives you a clear understanding of how Linux is structured. That knowledge will carry on over to other distros and will make it much, much easier to troubleshoot issues with your system if you know how the parts of that system work.

For those unaware or who never used it, it has a huge setup guide with copy/pastable commands to guide you through each step. Theres even an automated script from what I remember. They don’t just give you a pile of source code and tell you “good luck”.

I ran it as my primary distro on my main machine for a while way back when. I don’t recommend that.

What I do recommend is going though the entire process even if it’s just in a VM. It’s incredibly educational and will teach you a ton about Linux and OS construction in general. I used to recommend it to everyone I was teaching linux/ Unix too and all the students who actually went through it and completed it now have successful IT careers. 100% an incredibly valuable teaching resource, you will look at all OS’s with new eyes after you’ve built one bit by bit from source by hand.

That is just the gateway drug to bootstrapping.

Check out https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

if you want the real hard stuff.

I did. First page and said fuck it and left. Don’t have the energy for it. Lol

I did it during the gcc 3 transition. I used a very new gcc 3 (maybe even pre-release), which wasn’t at all recommended. A couple of (most?) C++ packages didn’t compile (some change having to do with namespace scope), which meant I had to fix the source of some packages (generally pretty trivial changes, usually having to prepend namespace:: to identifiers). Overall this problem was pretty rare, like it affected less than 1% of C++ files, but with things like Qt or Phoenix (or whatever Firefox was called back then), with thousands of files, I had to fix dozens of things. I guess running into problems made it more interesting and fun actually.

Did I learn anything? The main thing I learned is about all the different basic packages and what sort of binaries and libraries are included in them and why you need them. Also about some important config files in /etc. And a bit of shell experience, but I dare say I knew most of that stuff already. How much you learn depends a lot on how much you already know.

Overall what I learned was not very deep knowledge, nor was it a very time-efficient way to learn. But it was a chill learning experience, goal-oriented and motivating. And it made me more comfortable and confident in my ability to figure out and fix stuff.

Also it’s obviously not practical to keep that up to date, so I switched back to a distro after a couple of months of this.

Its on my bucket list. Maybe a fun project after I retire

Haven’t tried LFS yet but I have had my share of compiling custom Arch kernel (basically just making it smaller and boot a little bit faster), or cross-compiling various stuff for embedded and having to crawl through some of the lower level stuff.
It might be that time of a year to give LFS a try now that you mention it.

NCommander did it for a Christmas charity stream a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/live/tCh0XjyIAKU

I have never done Linux From Scratch but I have been using Linux long enough that I remember that is how things were. Compiling the kernel was pretty routine. Getting XFree86 up and running could be true black magic though. You were literally controlling how the electron beam moved across the screen.

One of my systems is running Red Hat 5.2 ( not RHEL - the pre-Fedora Red Hat ). I think it has GCC 2.7.2 on it.

For some reason, I want to get a recent kernel and X11 running on the Red Hat 5.2 box. It would be cool to get Distrobox running on it while leaving everything else vintage. I had been thinking that LFS might be the right resource to consult. This article will hopefully kick me into gear.

New machine arrives next week. LFS is on my TODO list for it.

I did a long LONG time ago. I don’t even remember so I’d say 20 years ago. It was very interesting. I do recommend doing it at least once… well maybe only once actually. If possible do it on a real computer, not a VM, so that you don’t get distracted and feel just a bit of risk. Obviously do NOT do it on your main computer where you have important data, just in case.