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by craigmart
1331 days ago
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Could you expand on why people shouldn't compile their kernel?
I think it's fairly useful to compile their own to get a better understanding of what the kernel does and to better suit everyone's needs. For example, if I have little free space on my boot partition and I have my disk encrypted, I want my kernel to be as small as possibile, so I will deselect every driver I don't need. Or maybe the driver for my new device is not included in the kernel builds of my distribution. Not only I woundn't say that most people shouldn't compile their kernel, I would say that most linux users* should do it at least once, so they can understand the power they have compared to closed-source operaring systems. *with linux users I mean users that use linux as their main operating system, not people that do ssh once in a while or rarely boots their linux partition |
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- everyone has better things to do than compile software they didn't write
- a good distro has probably tested it on a bunch of hardware, and hopefully signed it (or at least the packaging), so you know it was securely acquired and built
- you won't learn much at all about the Linux kernel by compiling it... you may learn a tiny introductory about about it by configuring it, but that's still not very much at all, really (it may seem like a lot when you don't know how to measure what you're learning)
- what you should learn from configuring and compiling a Linux kernel is that you don't ever want to be in a situation where you have to do it again (without a really spectacular reason, or being paid)
- if you're compiling a kernel because your boot partition is small... make it bigger, or don't have one at all. come on.