I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.

  • aard@kyu.de
    31·
    11 months ago

    Gentoo is useless for learning how things work. Back in the 00s when I still had time to hang out at events it was always quite ridiculous at what kind of basic stuff the gentoo crowd got stuck at - and with the tooling 15+ years more polished now I’d expect what is actually going on is way more hidden than back then.

    If you do want to understand how things work just build a minimal system - either on spare hardware, or qemu/kvm. Don’t go with systemd, or other fat userland options - that just makes you compile a lot of dependencies not adding value for learning.

    Use some lean init (or just write one yourself), and some lean shell.

    • theshatterstone54
      1·
      11 months ago

      How would you recommend I go about building a system? Should I start with LFS as a base/inspiration?

      • aard@kyu.de
        2·
        11 months ago

        I’d just start from very simple kernel and static init, and work my way up to adding more functionality. I’d use kvm with rootfs on p9fs - that allows playing with it without having to build images. I can throw together the initial invocation, if you’re interested.

        Then start building simple core elements in a language allowing easy static linking - I’d use C with dietlibc or go. Start adding core userland programs, explore initramfs (without using something like dracut), add dynamic libraries and explore the dynamic linker, … - if you’re interested we could set up a matrix channel for questions (typically with some lag, though), and do a github repo to follow along.

        LFS iirc goes for full desktop - the high level userland is very complex, but easy to understand when you know the basics. You pretty much learn how to compile lots of libraries - which has limited use. A full LFS style desktop I’d no longer recommend nowadays - it’s just too many dependencies to deal with. I used to build my own system (not following LFS) until the Xorg fork made it sigificantly more complicated - and things got just worse since then, and I never was using a complicated UI stack.

        edit: I had a few minutes, so I’ve thrown this together https://github.com/bwachter/lll - you should easily get a kernel with a custom init running, and have enough to start experimenting. If you or anyone else is interested to go deeper I’ll set up a matrix channel for guidance.