Comment by clintfred

The difference is that the people who designed X11 were honest in their intentions. The authors of systemd, wayland, etc are not. I'll just leave it at that.

(I recommend staying far away from "X11libre" also, for the same reason, with no further comment.)

Monolithic stuff is OK too, where it makes sense. The kernel is monolithic. ZFS is monolithic.

(Yes, this system has ZFS support. The module is built in to the kernel. In time it will support booting from ZFS also, when I finish the initrd code.)

There is a clear, solid reason for everything this system is or does. I'm not a contrarian or a purist, just someone with opinions gained from long experience who is not happy with the direction mainstream Linux is headed. My system is a zen garden of bliss compared to buggy garbage like Ubuntu.

Really, it's like someone added a turbo button. Ubuntu and friends are so bloated, laggy, and slow. I regularly use this system on 15-20+ year old hardware. The default window manager is Enlightenment e16. It's snappy and responsive everywhere.

KDE, Xfce, etc are supported also and are noticeably peppier than on mainstream distros, just due to the lack of bloat, gazillions of daemons running in the background, etc. Out of the box, nothing runs by default. You enable only what you want.

Another inviolable principle is that no application is allowed to originate or receive network traffic unless the user specifically requests it. There is ZERO network activity going on in the background. None of this steady stream of who knows what contacting who knows where that goes on with other systems. No auto update etc. No internet required or used during the system build. Python module installs do not consult the central repository or download anything. Meson or cmake does not download anything. Etc. All that's patched out and disabled.

It's a distro that is meant to be forked. It's very easily done. It's a blank slate, a vanilla Linux system with subtle and tasteful improvements that is the ideal starting point to customize to your exact specifications. If you want to add in systemd and wayland, fine, I don't care, it's your system and you can build it according to your desires. People can use this platform to build their own custom OS and save themselves a ton of work vs. starting completely from scratch.

It's a system that can be audited. Everything is built with shell scripts, starting with source archives and patches that are applied during the build process. It's all inspectable and the process can be understood step by step.

It's a way to hit the ground running with a full featured, working system, while learning in the process. This distro will teach you what LFS would teach you, but with less of a "sheer cliff face" learning curve, letting you focus more on higher aspects of building the system while still learning the low level details in time.

The build is actually overall simpler than LFS despite being way more featured, with things like Ada support. (Yes, it has GNAT.) I just found a way to do it better, and kept iterating countless times to simplify and improve to the max.

Existing systems did not satisfy my requirements or standards of quality, so I just had to create a new one.

I got rid of dbus in GTK3 by patching the code so that the "accessibility bridge" (to ATK) can be disabled. GTK4 is beneath contempt and will not be supported.

The system uses GTK2 wherever possible, or GTK3 when not. I will either port everything to GTK2 later or create some kind of shim library. Help wanted here. Porting back to GTK2 isn't hard, I just don't have time to work on any of that at the moment.

No, not even close. Totally different projects. This one is for experts only, or those who want to become experts. The type of person who has been toying with the idea of building a LFS system but doesn't really want to go through all the work and headache (and it's a ton, to build a full system.) It also supports cross compiling to other architectures, which LFS does not.

This system has many powerful features like built in ccache/distcc support for the build, support for building in QEMU, etc. Eventually it will be fully sandboxed.

There is a heavy emphasis on Doing Things Right according to an old school way of thinking. Everything is kept as simple as possible, yet as full featured as is practical. A major goal is to have everything documented and explained, starting with the shell scripts which build the system step by step in an easy to follow manner.

No package manager currently, though a simple one is in the works which is integrated into the build scripts. It's not really needed. You just build a complete system with all packages you want installed in a single run, with your own configuration pre-loaded. This gets compressed to a tarball. Then to install, create a partition, extract the tarball, edit a few files, install the bootloader, set passwords, and go.

For me, Linux From Scratch is not about compiling linux from scratch, but on building up an entire Linux distro from the ground up, understanding how every piece fits together.

Doing it via systemd is like drawing a big black box, writing LINUX on the side, and calling it a day.

The actual best decision would be to stick with his principles and make LFS be sysvinit-only instead, with zero fucks given about Gnome/KDE if they refuse to play ball.

I for one will not be strong armed into systemd or any other tech. If KDE makes it impossible for me to run without systemd, it goes into the trash bin. I will just install Trinity (KDE3) and be done with it. (Gnome deserves no consideration whatsoever.)