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'm from a time where there was ONLY compiling from scratch. No package managers either. Can't say I recommend it.

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".

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

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 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.

Did it about 10 years ago. Didn't really understand half of what I was doing at the time but it was a fun way to spend a weekend 😁

It was a lot of fun for me. I did it without a virtual machine (would not generally recommend) on a older laptop I wasn't using anyway. I wasn't very successful in the end however. My own built kernel couldn't produce any vga output. I tried to fix it for a handful of nights, but in the end gave up and called it good enough :P So I might comeback to it later to fully complete an installation.

But it was good learning oppertunity. It showed that just compiling a version of the Linux kernel isn't very complicated. It even comes with a very nice TUI to select your build options!

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

TIL this is a thing. I started doing that over 30 years ago with SLS and Slackware when that was the only choice.

This was pre-PnP (also pre-JPEG!), so you had to know all the addresses, IRQs, DMA info, etc, of your hardware or you'd get... unexpected results. make it and they will come...

After countless distros and flavours over the years, I still use Debian for servers and now use EndeavourOS for desktop/laptops.

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.

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

The consensus seems to be: go for it for the learning experience.

I did LFS some years back, but only enough to get to a basic working system. It eventually devolves into doing similar steps to compile each piece of software, which after you've compiled a bunch of packages already kind of becomes repetitive. The path of getting there is pretty fun though, it's a lot of reading and I learned a lot.. including that I'd never want to maintain a system like that.

Good learning experience though.

Did it to learn. Mostly because I had no wifi / internet at home during the time, but did have a burned CD and a book. Was useful, but when I started using Linux as a daily driver I went straight to Ubuntu, and later Fedora

Do recommend for learning and tinkering though.

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.

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.

Yes, back in the early 00s. We toyed with making a net-bootable image with it for our computer labs, but it was really not practical. It definitely taught me a ton about systems, though.

It’s definitely on my Linux bucket list. I’ve been kinda thinking about making a distro myself (specifically because I want to try some unusual and niche things in terms of system layout and package management), and that would be a good starting point.

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

I got through some of it then life got busy. It was a good and interesting experiences. I didn't finish with a fully functional hand crafted artisinal home desktop, though.

It’s a good time. I built it for a little laptop that was too small for anything else. Cross compiled the binaries on a normal computer.

Didn't know about this, might give it a try later on, thanks for sharing 🌻

Before the ArchLinux wiki became as good as it is, people like me used the Gentoo and LFS wikis as documentation for Linux.

There isn't quite enough time in the world for me to be able to use LFS in anger as much I would wish. We make do with source distros with source managers like Gentoo (surprise!), Funtoo and others which give the source distros users just enough helping hands of dependency management.

Real tears would be shed were for LFS to disappear.