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by scatbot 207 days ago
One of the reasons why I'm using OpenBSD is because it passes what I think of as a litmus test for FLOSS software: can I build the whole thing from scratch, in a short time and with minimal fuss? In the case of OpenBSD, the answer is yes. I can install it on a new machine, fetch the source code from mirrors, do some edits to the source, build a fresh release, write it to a USB stick and boot it on another machine. On my machine, the whole process takes about 10 minutes for the kernel, additional 20 minutes for base and maybe an hour if you add Xenocara. Compare that to Linux distros like Ubuntu or Arch where building from scratch is either discouraged or some fringe activity that requires skimming through wiki articles, forum posts or old Websites on the Wayback Machine.
3 comments

Gentoo is a Linux rolling release built from source (just recently they gave the option of using binary packages as well). I've ran it on my desktop for years.
Buildroot does exactly that and it gives you big TUI menu to pick what you want included in your linux image
There is also T2 SDE.
Does OpenBSD have Bootstrappable Builds from source without any binaries? I'm guessing not yet, since GNU Guix (Linux distro) pioneered that, and I haven't seen any BSD distro interested in the related Reproducible Builds project.

https://bootstrappable.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/