Linux From Scratch has been called impractical for years. Fine. Of course it is. It takes at least forty hours, and that is assuming things go reasonably well. When you finish, there is no package manager waiting to rescue you. No clean update path. No layer of polish smoothing over the hard parts. Every binary on that machine exists because you compiled it. Every configuration file exists because you wrote it. That much is obvious. The real question is whether that matters. It does. More than most people are willing to say out loud. Not because LFS belongs on a production server. It does not. Not because it is the smartest way to run a modern environment. It is not. That misses the point completely. The point is what it does to your understanding. Because there is a kind of knowledge that only comes from doing something the hard way, from first principles, with your own hands. You do not get that from browsing a wiki. You do not get it from skimming documentation and nodding along. You get it by getting stuck. By getting it wrong. By sitting in a chroot at two in the morning, staring at a kernel that refuses to compile, and staying there until the system finally makes sense. That experience does something documentation alone cannot do. It burns the lesson in. It forces the abstractions to fall away. It turns Linux from a product you use into a system you actually understand. And once you have that, you keep it. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gtiUeRhb #Linux #LinuxFromScratch #OpenSource #SystemsEngineering #DevOps #Infrastructure #SoftwareEngineering #OperatingSystems #LearnByDoing #LFS
Jon W.
6d
I didn’t go to school for computers, so maybe I’d be wrong to say this about four years of college/uni, but I can say that you’ll learn more in a weekend with LFS than you’ll learn in your first several years of work. Imagine actually understanding how application code interacts at the kernel level. A lot of places don’t look for that kind of skill, it’s often not needed, but it’s a 2x skill set, at least. I’ve got no formal education in this stuff, and I’m able to do what I do, to live the life and lifestyle I live, because of the giants who make things like LFS. If you’re trying to break into IT in a serious way at the OS layer (or, I suppose, backend code, probably helps for DBAs, too): RHCSA/LFCA + LFS + Kubernetes the hard way. If you did all that and understood half of it well, you’d be in the top 25% of people in the industry (hyperbole … probably). You’d definitely be better suited for jobs I’ve hired for than 9/10 people I’ve interviewed in the past.
LFS I did in early 2000s was the thing that showed me how Linux works in depths. It also naturally pushed me later to use Gentoo. Beautiful times. Meaningfull, fun experiment that shaped my Linux experience for many years.
James Galyen
5d
Michael Mendy take that back. I followed the Gentoo ricing forum. Making by gentoo into a tokyo drifter And crashing just as much. 2 days until I found out it was an april fools jokes Yep. You are correct! boches and later qemu windows hosting gentoo hosting windows inception was fun
As a former member of the NetBSD development team (I'm the guy who originally wrote its top level cross compile bootstrapper), I can vouch for building an entire operating system from bare source. It gives you a deeper understanding of the tools used to build software. If things go wrong, it pushes you to understand those tools even further. And later, when the build for some customer facing application you're working on breaks the build, you fully understand what that error is telling you.
Wezley S.
6d
This is exactly why I used to teach Java engineers that I trained with a “build it before you use it” approach. Before Spring, build a tiny dependency-management pattern. Before Hibernate, use JDBC. Before higher-level web frameworks, expose endpoints with plain Java and then servlets. Not because frameworks are bad. Because once you understand the layer underneath the abstraction, you make better decisions when the abstraction leaks.
40 hours? try 2. And if you don't like that, I automated it to take less than 20 minutes as the base for Dark Horse Linux before we start to "darkhorserize" it. And if you don't want to build it yourself, you can just download it at: www.darkhorselinux.org 40 hours for Linux from Scratch. Ha. You don't have enough "Chris Punches" in your workflow.
Linux from Scratch was a core aspect of my thesis back in the time I studied IT engineering. It allowed me to provide a sample of a thin client that was able to start from zero to web browser within 30 seconds and that was something pretty cool back then. (I am talking about 2008/2009 times... ;-))So thank you, LFS, for that.
FULL ACK. I was born a bootstrapper and this deeply resonates with my personal philosophy. You said it perfectly: It is about learning and internalizing, not misguided perfectionism. You dont need to invent the wheel every time you go for a bike ride. But you should understand the physics and be able to fix your bike in any situation. For me this is the opposite end of "vibe coding". Use automation, using AI to augment your processes. But invest the time to train yourself and your team, or allow for the time and resources to educate your team if you are in a leadership position. The ROI will be smashing.
I got bit by the Linux bug back in the early 2000s. A colleague and I were working with a shoestring budget, and Linux on old PCs let us build out all sorts of surprisingly capable systems. We went down the Gentoo rabbit hole one summer, chasing a bit more performance out of that "donated" hardware. In the end we landed on Ubuntu, but that experience stuck with me. There's something different about building it up piece by piece and watching where it breaks. You start to see what's actually happening under the hood instead of just trusting that it works. I don't run Gentoo today, but I still lean on what it taught me every time something doesn't behave the way it should.