<story><title>Build yourself a Linux</title><url>https://github.com/MichielDerhaeg/build-linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>Back in 2002 I ran LFS for a semester and a half. Then I got tired of saving all my .&amp;#x2F;configure flags and switch to Redhat and gained a respect for package management. :-P Eventually I started using Gentoo.&lt;p&gt;Still, I&amp;#x27;m really glad I built and ran an LFS for nearly a year. It helped me build a really in-dept knowledge of Linux that&amp;#x27;s helped me as I later moved into embedded development.&lt;p&gt;Today I still use Gentoo (which feels like LFS with package management) and Void and would recommend either for Linux devs.</text></item><item><author>digi_owl</author><text>Both this and LFS reminds me that Linux makes sense until you get the DEs involved. At that point shit just sprawls all over the place as there are no longer any notion of layers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vbezhenar</author><text>I did exactly the same in 2005. I even wrote my own init scripts, so I really understood a lot what&amp;#x27;s going on at startup time. Linux was quite simple at that time. I could write my own init, if I wanted. Unfortunately now this knowledge is obsolete. Systemd is a complex beast which uses a lot of arcane techniques, I&amp;#x27;m hardly understanding it. chroot was a really simple concept, but nowadays people use containers, and they are much more complex than chroot. Logging is complicated. In the past I could try to load and then mount partition from livecd or another OS and read logs, now I don&amp;#x27;t know how to do it. Init scripts were simple bash scripts. They were verbose, may be buggy, but after all they were just bash scripts and every Linux user knows bash, so every Linux user could write or modify init script. Now systemd uses its own format, I&amp;#x27;m spending hours every time I need to write new service or timer for RedHat. SELinux is just so complex. I know about UNIX permissions. They are so simple and elegant. I&amp;#x27;m using them everywhere, when I need security. I could explain them in 2 minutes. SELinux has books. I have those books in bookmarks, may be I&amp;#x27;ll read them sometimes. But until then, I just use copy-pasta from internets to solve my tasks, like allow ssh to listen at non-standard port. I don&amp;#x27;t think that it&amp;#x27;s good, that I have to run some random strings on my computer from root without fully understanding what they are doing. SELinux has binary compiled configurations and some encrypted logs for tools to decipher them, what a mess! Sometimes I just disable it to get things done.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong. I think that Linux looks more professional, more robust, especially for system administrators, who can devote their lives to learn about those systems. But for hobbyists, who doesn&amp;#x27;t have a lot of time, Linux became much less transparent.&lt;p&gt;May be if I didn&amp;#x27;t have that prior knowledge, it would be easier to learn those things from scratch. But I doubt it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Build yourself a Linux</title><url>https://github.com/MichielDerhaeg/build-linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>Back in 2002 I ran LFS for a semester and a half. Then I got tired of saving all my .&amp;#x2F;configure flags and switch to Redhat and gained a respect for package management. :-P Eventually I started using Gentoo.&lt;p&gt;Still, I&amp;#x27;m really glad I built and ran an LFS for nearly a year. It helped me build a really in-dept knowledge of Linux that&amp;#x27;s helped me as I later moved into embedded development.&lt;p&gt;Today I still use Gentoo (which feels like LFS with package management) and Void and would recommend either for Linux devs.</text></item><item><author>digi_owl</author><text>Both this and LFS reminds me that Linux makes sense until you get the DEs involved. At that point shit just sprawls all over the place as there are no longer any notion of layers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digi_owl</author><text>I am of two minds about package managers after having used Gobolinux for some years.&lt;p&gt;Because once i got familiar with Gobolinux and how it handles things, i can&amp;#x27;t shake the feel that most package managers introduce as many problems as they solve.&lt;p&gt;The biggest is that while _nix have sonames to handle multiple lib versions installed at the same time, most package managers balk at there being more than one package of a given name installed at the same time (Debian apparently works around this by including soname-like info in the package names).</text></comment>