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Let me take the flak: No. Why? Well - unless you have a very specific reason [1] it seems to me that LFS is too much time invested for not enough return. As ot

Let me take the flak: No. Why? Well - unless you have a very specific reason [1] it seems to me that LFS is too much time invested for not enough return. As others commented, you can go a long way with a source based distribution. Learning a different distribution's way to do things might already be pretty interesting (and arguably more useful: You'll probably never hit a LFS system in real use that needs fixing, but you might stumble upon a solaris/freebsd machine or even just a heap of Suse/RedHat/Debian/Slackware machines) and challenging. Start with that! LFS is a purely academic thing for me. You follow the guide, just to end up with a system that is really nothing for daily use (or - needs too much work). All the above assumes that your definition of a linux poweruser is someone that understands the darkest secrets of the OS. Which - is not exactly necessary. I know plenty of users that I'd consider power users because they focus on things they actually need (and improve those, get better at those), not things that somehow make this possible. Cue the car analogy: A race driver would be a power user for me, I don't require that he can build a race car from scratch.. [1]: Some reasons I could imagine to change the answer to a yes: 1) You want to really build your own distribution for an embedded device and don't like openembedded 2) You are (or plan to) a system administrator and want to learn more underlying details for your job. 3) You plan to get into system-level programming/contribution and want to understand the status quo first.

wtracy 16y ago
I'll mostly agree. If you foresee building any custom embedded Linux systems, even if you like openembedded, it gives you a good picture of what's going on down there (and a good picture of what openembedded is doing for you). If you want to learn system administration, I really don't see it being that helpful. You'll learn what all the components of the system are and how to build them, but not necessarily how to use them. I'd suggest that if you're a hacker type, you might want to try it anyway, just for fun. :-) But in general the knowledge you get from building LFS or Gentoo or similar isn't actually that useful from a system administrator/power user perspective. I'll also second the comments from other people who built it, and then abandoned it: LFS is too finicky to manage and too hard to upgrade for me to do any real work with it. For me, it's a toy system that I play around with, then reboot into Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever to go get real work done.
hardik988 16y ago
Thanks. This is the exact reason I love Hacker News. I could not have asked for much more. And yeah , the kind of 'poweruser' I want to be is just knowing what is required, and not too much. I'll be sure to check out Gentoo which has been a popular suggestion, even by some of my college seniors.

wtracy 16y ago

I'll mostly agree. If you foresee building any custom embedded Linux systems, even if you like openembedded, it gives you a good picture of what's going on down there (and a good picture of what openembedded is doing for you). If you want to learn system administration, I really don't see it being that helpful. You'll learn what all the components of the system are and how to build them, but not necessarily how to use them. I'd suggest that if you're a hacker type, you might want to try it anyway, just for fun. :-) But in general the knowledge you get from building LFS or Gentoo or similar isn't actually that useful from a system administrator/power user perspective. I'll also second the comments from other people who built it, and then abandoned it: LFS is too finicky to manage and too hard to upgrade for me to do any real work with it. For me, it's a toy system that I play around with, then reboot into Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever to go get real work done.

hardik988 16y ago

Thanks. This is the exact reason I love Hacker News. I could not have asked for much more. And yeah , the kind of 'poweruser' I want to be is just knowing what is required, and not too much. I'll be sure to check out Gentoo which has been a popular suggestion, even by some of my college seniors.