The first run isn't much fun. There are useful skills in just knowing how to build stuff, and knowing all the constituent parts of a running system. But overall I suspect you'd learn more in a year of using Arch.

But on subsequent play-throughs, you get to be creative! Want to ignore the FHS and try putting your apps somewhere weird? Want to use a different libc or init system? Build everything around an esoteric shell? Go for maximum optimisation? It's the replayability that makes Linux from Scratch fun, and yes, totally worth working out what your own distro might look like.

I think it depends on one's true goals and the way it's approached. Compare with http://www.greenfly.org/mes.html (which affects many Arch users too, I feel)

You would start with LFS to build a base and then add your own package manager to make a “true” distro.

If you want to just build an existing distro from scratch then they all have ways of doing that as they need to rebuild packages regularly. Eg: It’s a lot simpler to build a fedora image from scratch by using Koji/OSBuild vs LFS as Koji/OSBuild basically automate the whole LFS process.

Additionally in order to have fun with LFS you don’t really need to do the whole book. You can make your own little Linux “distro” from scratch with the kernel and statically linked busybox. Busybox comes with all the minimal utilities so you can pick and choose what you want to write and what you want to reuse.

I wonder if some sort of “BSD from scratch” would be a more fruitful exercise. Since they include more of the overall system, you’d end up with something approximating a regular BSD install pretty well at the end.

I think the cool part about kernel + busybox type sandbox is that you can get a working system with only 2 binaries and doesn’t even need a cross-compiler.

when I was playing with this stuff the hardest part for me was getting my head around:

1. why do I need a cross-compiler if my system has a compiler already??? 2. why do I need to compile the compiler twice??

And well it turns out you don’t really need these steps but they’re required as part of the bootstrap process for GCC/glibc itself.

How is Busybox security and bugginess-wise? I’m always worried about going off the beaten path, but I guess the busybox path is pretty beaten by cloud folks and those sorts… who are actually operating in a much more hostile environment than my desktop.

A "BSD from scratch" project would end up closer to something along the lines of "Debian from scratch" or "Redhat from scratch". You would be performing an exercise in bootstrapping, and little else.

You can think of a LFS as training before actually tackling an original distribution: distributions are complex, even following the steps of a LFS won't necessarily yield a working system (lots of room for mistakes).

Or, as a base to build a distribution: you can automatize some of the process, slap a pkgsrc on top, etc.

For budding programmers, it's a great exercise: discover software, appreciate dependencies, understand components of a Linux distribution, learn how to build things from source, configure a kernel, etc.

Learning how things work under the hood is fun, and you should do this if your job revolves around Linux.

> building an actual usable distro "from scratch".

could you say a few words on how this would avoid building and installing the required software individually? are you thinking of osdev instead?

I assume they were alluding to package managers, automation, and release engineering, which are somewhat covered in the LFS Hints Project (https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/)

Building an actually usable distro means doing this, but every day for every package that updated, and scripting it for other people to use.