Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

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I had a lot of fun doing this. You really get a feel for the evolution of build systems -- from older software that uses automake/make to newer programs that use meson/ninja/cmake etc. It was also cool to learn how to bootstrap a bespoke set of development tools tuned for your hardware.

It took me a solid weekend to get everything built. I was able to get a basic LFS system built on a Saturday, and on Sunday I did the "Beyond Linux From Scratch" edition. At one point I got stuck trying to debug a weird interaction between systemd and PAM that took me a while to unravel. That was humbling, I thought I knew just about everything about Linux, but turns out there are large areas where I just don't have a clue.

The docs are well written and maintained, so there wasn't a lot of frustration there. Even if you're not an old hand at Linux you can likely get pretty far by just diligently following the instructions.

I struggled a lot more trying to make a decent desktop environment than I did getting the OS setup. I spent so much time trying to get a nice-looking toolbar (polybar) and basic stuff (like how patched fonts work) took me an embarrasingly long time to sort out. I also didn't know what a compositor was, or why you might want one. I enjoyed figuring out the basics of compton, which allowed me to get cool transparent backgrounds on windows[0], although I never did quite figure out how to get rounded corners.

[0]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/spudlyo.png

I made a "linux from scratch" years ago and sometimes i consider doing it again (this time i will try to write some scripts to automate some things so it can be easier to update stuff)... but last time i did that was many years ago and i do not remember needing much more than automake. The modern proliferation of build tools makes me think that i'll end up wasting more space on auxiliary tools than on the actual software and libraries i want to build myself.

How founded are my fears? :-P

How do i get started too? Where should i begin with?

I don't know if you're referring to the Linux From Scratch part or the desktop customization part of the comment you're replying to, but if latter:

Visit here for inspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ (safe for work, despite the name).

Pick a window manager, learn how to use it, and go from there. Popular options are i3 (i3-gaps if you want some space between windows), sway (i3, but for Wayland), bspwm, awesome wm. Usually they're used in combination with polybar (highly customizable status bar) and rofi as an application launcher.

That's right, /r/unixporn influenced me quite a lot. I read a lot of folks' dotfiles that were posted there and was inspired by the screenshots. Because I had built a lot of software with LFS, I wasn't at all afraid of tackling building custom versions of i3 (i3-gaps) and compton (compton-tyrone) to get visual bling.

Unixporn is often too flashy for my tastes. Something like DWM with a CPU and RAM meter up top is often enough. Why we gotta mix compositors with 3D file system explorers and animated desktops is beyond my needs, but I'm atleast guilty of the animated wallpaper trend

Begin with installing, e.g. VirtualBox, end obtaining a distro with a toolchain.

Then add a, say, 10Gb volume to your guest instance and party like you're on the road to mad skillz.

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