| If you follow the guide step-by-step, like an interpreter evaluating an LFS build script, you’ll probably not get much out of LFS. LFS, KISS and, most recently FreeBSD were extremely educational for me. They showed me what each piece of my system was for, where to look when things went wrong, where to look when I wanted to tweak something, etc. For a modern Linux installer, liked Debian or Ubuntu, I feel like I’m looking off a cliff face into an abyss. They say it’s “free as in freedom” - and I know it’s technically true - but I don’t feel like I’m equipped to understand the system the installer produced without a decade investment of time. The way I’d interact with those systems was a lot like “free as in free beer” - I knew I _could_ fix it if something didn’t work quite right, but frankly I didn’t know _how_ to fix it or where to start. So I just consumed it like I would proprietary software; it was a big black box I never looked inside. On KISS, I ported the base system to a raspberry PI as my first task - the system was simple enough that I could just tackle that out the gate. For LFS I had a lightbulb moment - understanding what all those packages that scrolled by in an “apt” install were about, how they fit together, and why a distro needed “patches.” It taught me what a distribution _was_ and the work that went into building and maintaining one. It taught me what the “base system” ecosystem consisted of. With FreeBSD ports, by day 3, I was floating my own patch on top of my window manager because the config file didn’t have a setting I wanted. As a sibling said, you get out what you put in. |
I often feel that way about FOSS in general. The freedom is more 'theoretical' than practical, although FOSS means that such software are much less hostile to users.
I appreciate repairable laptops and electronics more than I appreciate software freedom. The freedom felt more real.