what catches my eye about LFS is the user's involvement in the process of getting your system working, seems like a good learning experience, i feel like i'd become the ultimate Linux wizard or smth i imagine LFS helps with learning programming in C and C++ as well, which in turn would boost one's learning ability with other programming languages, especially similar ones like Rust. now i wanna install LFS ;-;
LFS in terms of programming, while a great dev environment, doesn't teach much about programming but rather compilation and GNU's method on approaching that problem via Make, GCC, autoconf, and autotools. However you can specify CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS which are noted by I think GCC and it puts the contents of those variables into the GCC commands. Most people just have C{,XX}FLAGS="-O2" which optimizes libraries and binaries, if the package doesn't do that by default. The good thing is LFS is a good dev environment so you're not limited by your setup to learn. But yeah, LFS is heavily user focused and you can do basically anything you want. On other distros, doing your own thing could be seen and deviating from the distro or bad practice, but on LFS it's sometimes needed for some packages. Basically any hiccup is not by the distro anymore, it's the fault of a package or the way you have done something, which can make things easier to fix!
Nice! The algorithm arbitrarily suggested this video to me. Finally, another LFS lover/user! :-) I used BLFS (KDE) as my main desktop machine for ages. I don't currently, but I'm sure i will again soon. I love that you're using dwm in an LFS, which iirc the book does not discuss. Good on you!
BLFS just mentions very old window managers instead of talking about DWM, BSPWM, AwesomeWM, Hyprland, i3, etc. Although diverging from BLFS is routine for me by this point lmao. Nice to meet a fellow LFS user!
@@zeckma "diverging from BLFS is routine for me" - hah, yes I saw that after I excitedly commented. I think my computer usage is normally so minimal/boring/call it what you will (give me Emacs, a web browser and hassle-free hardware function and I'm happy) that I've been happy living within BLFS-land for years and years. I think it might be time to explore modern WMs though. Not sure I can bring myself to feel excited about Steam, but I did enjoy Truck Simulator once upon a time, so maybe I'll watch some of your adventures with Steam and get it going too :-) Great to see videos from a fellow autist too 🫡
Great explanation of some things I've never considered, couldn't start with LFS for the life of me but with the ways you described the positives it's def a "distro" I'll consider on the horizon.
In the distant future. While I love it, it's definitely not for everyone. Arch or Gentoo is perfect for most people who are more wanting from their system. LFS is a lot of work but it's worth it if you really care about the advantages that much.
Ok, this is a nice overview (except the music vs speech levels being bad, the music is distracting A LOT the speech, hearing the words is difficult) So, what I take from it is that a) you have better control on what to install and when to update, and b) by actually manually compiling, you have greater control to configure it, as compared to Gentoo which only has USE flags and those don't control everything. Sorry to hear your story on multilib and Steam on Gentoo, on my end that went without issues. I didn't had to unmask much, and then everything worked flawlessly, from first try, so to speak. For Gentoo's way of working, which basically boils down to emerge and portage, having masking and overlays is something needed, it makes total sense. It's too early for me to tell if it's the best way of achieving this though (masking and unmasking = choose which versions you want and overlays = custom repositories). Btw, for the licenses bit, you have the option to accept all licenses, if it's something you don't care about. Lastly, speaking of overlays, say, if you do LFS for 1-2 computers, that's ok. Buut, if you go on more, then using portage and emerge can help you greatly. That is the nice thing about it, streamlining the building process. You can setup an overlay (and also remove/disconnect the Gentoo's one) and only use yours. And in yours, you can add whatever programs and versions you want. Also, you can create your custom USE flags for those programs. And in the "clients" computers, you can then pull from the computer that hosts the overlay and in this way you can manage your custom installs for multiple computers easier. Not to mention, you can even do the compiling on one computer and have the others getting the binary directly. I haven't done an ebuild file from scratch, but from what I've seen it doesn't seem that complicated. It's akin to a Dockerfile. One last thing that Gentoo has that is nice for not-so-advanced users like me (yet), is that it takes care of dependencies. At least for now, I'm grateful of not having to manually check and research them. While still having the option to compile them with AVX on and without bluetooth support, for example. However, I don't know yet (fortunately didn't had a situation yet) where 2 apps need the same library, but different versions of it, so I can't tell if Gentoo can handle this or not, and if yes, how well. Oh, and this is really the last thing - on Gentoo you can certainly install something and NEVER update it, by using the masking system. What is less ideal is that on gentoo's main overlay/repository, you don't have easy access to old stuff. So you can have, Firefox version 15 from whatever 2 decades ago that version was. But if you want to install that NOW, well, you can do that, but unless you find an overlay with that version offered directly, then you do have to jump through some hoops for that. Nothing super complicated nor very time consuming, but certainly nice if it wasn't necessary.
I really like your perspective on it! I'll try it again at some point because my experience probably led me to feel like Gentoo can't and won't work for me. Thanks for letting me know. I'll probably still use LFS though because I do just love compiling software and do it as a past time.
@@zeckma Compiling is magical :D Thank you as well for the LFS take, it was nice to see it, I kinda thought that the USE flags cover everything, now I know they don't.
Yeah, it's off and got told the music is too loud. I'll try to have a better recording for next time I do something like this. Re-recording this entire thing would be a nightmare.
I was looking forward to watching this, but I had to stop. After 5-6 minutes, the music shifted to the foreground and your voice shifted to the background and I couldn't understand a thing you were saying. : (
My top 3 favorite Linux distributions: Arch Linux Debian Linux From Scratch LFS has worked every time I try installing it whereas Gentoo has only worked twice after reboot.
If you install a package manager on LFS, doesn't it become that distro? lol. Like if you install apt, nix, or pacman does it become debian based, nix based, or arch based? lmao
I was kind of thinking that as well. Like, if you get everything running, but then install pacman and update the whole system with it, the result will kind of be that same as if you just pacstrapped everything onto the system from the start.
Kinda, the whole definition of a distro is muddled but I tend to not even consider package managers despite being a distro's core identity. What matters to me is if the distro is easily reproducible (most builds of a distro look about the same) and the /etc/lsb-release goes over which distro it is. This is why I think LFS is a distro - most builds of LFS look the same and the lsb-release file says the distro is Linux From Scratch (I decided not to add the lsb-release file personally).
Found you through your appearance on brodies show, love the dedication to get LFS up and running. Keep up the cool stuff!
Me too
LFS is not a distro its just a guide book
what catches my eye about LFS is the user's involvement in the process of getting your system working, seems like a good learning experience, i feel like i'd become the ultimate Linux wizard or smth
i imagine LFS helps with learning programming in C and C++ as well, which in turn would boost one's learning ability with other programming languages, especially similar ones like Rust.
now i wanna install LFS ;-;
LFS in terms of programming, while a great dev environment, doesn't teach much about programming but rather compilation and GNU's method on approaching that problem via Make, GCC, autoconf, and autotools. However you can specify CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS which are noted by I think GCC and it puts the contents of those variables into the GCC commands. Most people just have C{,XX}FLAGS="-O2" which optimizes libraries and binaries, if the package doesn't do that by default. The good thing is LFS is a good dev environment so you're not limited by your setup to learn. But yeah, LFS is heavily user focused and you can do basically anything you want. On other distros, doing your own thing could be seen and deviating from the distro or bad practice, but on LFS it's sometimes needed for some packages. Basically any hiccup is not by the distro anymore, it's the fault of a package or the way you have done something, which can make things easier to fix!
low music audio plz
Nice! The algorithm arbitrarily suggested this video to me. Finally, another LFS lover/user! :-)
I used BLFS (KDE) as my main desktop machine for ages. I don't currently, but I'm sure i will again soon. I love that you're using dwm in an LFS, which iirc the book does not discuss. Good on you!
BLFS just mentions very old window managers instead of talking about DWM, BSPWM, AwesomeWM, Hyprland, i3, etc. Although diverging from BLFS is routine for me by this point lmao. Nice to meet a fellow LFS user!
@@zeckma "diverging from BLFS is routine for me" - hah, yes I saw that after I excitedly commented. I think my computer usage is normally so minimal/boring/call it what you will (give me Emacs, a web browser and hassle-free hardware function and I'm happy) that I've been happy living within BLFS-land for years and years. I think it might be time to explore modern WMs though. Not sure I can bring myself to feel excited about Steam, but I did enjoy Truck Simulator once upon a time, so maybe I'll watch some of your adventures with Steam and get it going too :-) Great to see videos from a fellow autist too 🫡
Background music is way to loud and ads nothing to the video🙂
LFS is amazing and then I saw the GPU & it doubled the respect.
Great explanation of some things I've never considered, couldn't start with LFS for the life of me but with the ways you described the positives it's def a "distro" I'll consider on the horizon.
In the distant future. While I love it, it's definitely not for everyone. Arch or Gentoo is perfect for most people who are more wanting from their system. LFS is a lot of work but it's worth it if you really care about the advantages that much.
Ok, this is a nice overview (except the music vs speech levels being bad, the music is distracting A LOT the speech, hearing the words is difficult)
So, what I take from it is that a) you have better control on what to install and when to update, and b) by actually manually compiling, you have greater control to configure it, as compared to Gentoo which only has USE flags and those don't control everything.
Sorry to hear your story on multilib and Steam on Gentoo, on my end that went without issues. I didn't had to unmask much, and then everything worked flawlessly, from first try, so to speak.
For Gentoo's way of working, which basically boils down to emerge and portage, having masking and overlays is something needed, it makes total sense. It's too early for me to tell if it's the best way of achieving this though (masking and unmasking = choose which versions you want and overlays = custom repositories).
Btw, for the licenses bit, you have the option to accept all licenses, if it's something you don't care about.
Lastly, speaking of overlays, say, if you do LFS for 1-2 computers, that's ok. Buut, if you go on more, then using portage and emerge can help you greatly. That is the nice thing about it, streamlining the building process. You can setup an overlay (and also remove/disconnect the Gentoo's one) and only use yours. And in yours, you can add whatever programs and versions you want. Also, you can create your custom USE flags for those programs. And in the "clients" computers, you can then pull from the computer that hosts the overlay and in this way you can manage your custom installs for multiple computers easier. Not to mention, you can even do the compiling on one computer and have the others getting the binary directly. I haven't done an ebuild file from scratch, but from what I've seen it doesn't seem that complicated. It's akin to a Dockerfile.
One last thing that Gentoo has that is nice for not-so-advanced users like me (yet), is that it takes care of dependencies. At least for now, I'm grateful of not having to manually check and research them. While still having the option to compile them with AVX on and without bluetooth support, for example. However, I don't know yet (fortunately didn't had a situation yet) where 2 apps need the same library, but different versions of it, so I can't tell if Gentoo can handle this or not, and if yes, how well.
Oh, and this is really the last thing - on Gentoo you can certainly install something and NEVER update it, by using the masking system. What is less ideal is that on gentoo's main overlay/repository, you don't have easy access to old stuff. So you can have, Firefox version 15 from whatever 2 decades ago that version was. But if you want to install that NOW, well, you can do that, but unless you find an overlay with that version offered directly, then you do have to jump through some hoops for that. Nothing super complicated nor very time consuming, but certainly nice if it wasn't necessary.
I really like your perspective on it! I'll try it again at some point because my experience probably led me to feel like Gentoo can't and won't work for me. Thanks for letting me know. I'll probably still use LFS though because I do just love compiling software and do it as a past time.
@@zeckma Compiling is magical :D Thank you as well for the LFS take, it was nice to see it, I kinda thought that the USE flags cover everything, now I know they don't.
FWIW, the stereo on this one's a tinge messed up. My left ear enjoyed, though, even as a Debian-for-life guy (at least for terminal stuff)
Yeah, it's off and got told the music is too loud. I'll try to have a better recording for next time I do something like this. Re-recording this entire thing would be a nightmare.
I imagine so :p
I was looking forward to watching this, but I had to stop. After 5-6 minutes, the music shifted to the foreground and your voice shifted to the background and I couldn't understand a thing you were saying. : (
Same here... really disappointed :(
My top 3 favorite Linux distributions:
Arch Linux
Debian
Linux From Scratch
LFS has worked every time I try installing it whereas Gentoo has only worked twice after reboot.
If you install a package manager on LFS, doesn't it become that distro? lol. Like if you install apt, nix, or pacman does it become debian based, nix based, or arch based? lmao
I was kind of thinking that as well. Like, if you get everything running, but then install pacman and update the whole system with it, the result will kind of be that same as if you just pacstrapped everything onto the system from the start.
Kinda, the whole definition of a distro is muddled but I tend to not even consider package managers despite being a distro's core identity. What matters to me is if the distro is easily reproducible (most builds of a distro look about the same) and the /etc/lsb-release goes over which distro it is. This is why I think LFS is a distro - most builds of LFS look the same and the lsb-release file says the distro is Linux From Scratch (I decided not to add the lsb-release file personally).
for building projects nothing better than ext4
how long did it take to compile?
40 or so hours.
Alpine?
audio omg