For those of you who don’t know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code.
What was your experience like? Was it easier or harder than you expected? Do you run it as a daily driver or did you just do it for fun?
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, learned a lot. But it’s not really a system that can be maintained very easily. You don’t even have a package manager. :)
Back when I did LFS I dealt with this by giving each package an /opt prefix, symlinking their respective bin/, sbin/, lib/, man/ and so on dirs under a common place, and adding those places to the relevant system integrations (PATH, /etc/ld.so.conf etc.)
I put together a bash script that could manage the sumlinks and pack/unpack tarballs, and also wrote metadata file and a configure/make “recipe” to each package dir. It worked surprisingly well.
A handful of packages turned out to be hardcoding system paths so they couldn’t be prefixed into /opt (without patching) but most things could.
Its on my bucket list. Maybe a fun project after I retire
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.
