Has anyone followed this from start to finish and can now comfortably compile their own linux kernel from scratch?
I don't think it's worth pursuing to a GUI, unless you have a burning desire to customize or fix brokenness in that experience you've had on other Linuxes.
The point is definitely not to continuously manage your own distro you built from scratch, unless that's your job or hobby.
I use the knowledge I gained from the experience to debug many random instances of brokenness on Linux, both personally and professionally. It also made compiling from source a fairly comfy option when necessary (e.g. you need to fork, or backport a piece of software).
I still feel pretty comfortable in compiling a linux from source. Userland specialization is also a neat topic.
Once you get X and google chrome it becomes pretty self sustainable. Updating the kernel is easy but upgrading the compiler / C library is a nightmare.
A lot of programs you might want to use provide binaries that makes things a bit easier, but there were some annoying days of dependency chasing if you have to install from source. I ended up writing some custom scripts to ./configure, make, and make install into a deb from .tar.gz.
About the initial LFS process, I had messed up a few steps pretty bad, and had to restart / go back one or two times. The worst mistake was embarking on the journey first by installing everything into a USB flash drive. Eventually data corruption / loss ruined the yacc binary (or similar? hard to remember) and I spent days trying to figure out what went wrong. After moving to an SSD it worked better :)
Definitely one of my favorite and most rewarding projects I've done.
I could see value in building a basic Linux from scratch. Beyond that you are just copy pasting commands from READMEs for hundreds of projects.
I started using Linux when it was still necessary to compile your own Kernel to support literally anything going beyond the absolute base setup.
The most difficult parts were bootstrapping the system and getting the glibc stuff right. The rest is indeed rather robotic, although I think there is some kind of package manager now included.
I also did the whole book (manually!) as a slacker student. I guess if you do it/let it run automatically as you read the book, you'll know your installed OS inside and out...
Bottom line: It's not worth it.
I use debian now.
It wasn’t my call, and it’s a defense move rather than an opinion on the state of Gentoos security. I know they take things very seriously, but my assertions aren’t enough to make my employer feel comfortable.