LFS is good for learning, but if you want a long term maintainable solution, use Gentoo instead.
(Disclaimer: 18 year Gentoo user speaking)
(Disclaimer: 18 year Gentoo user speaking)
I was just mesmerized by the scrolling compiler messages, amazed to see something that complex transform into a working system.
And once it was done I usually found a reason to start over again, just one more flag to make it perfect.
Oddly, I can't remember ever actually using Gentoo, just compiling.
Was a lot of fun, but a huge amount of time compiling
Every time I decided to try a new window manager and update USE flags to do something like add GTK support for Gnome, or QT for KDE, and obviously remove whatever I had to start with for optimization it would recompile everything. I remember in particular doing something like a fresh Gnome install, starting to use it and realizing I'd missed a USE flag for audio and having to re-compile all the Gnome apps to have them be able to use sound.
Was fun, but brutal in terms of efficiency.
It's a time sink compared to binary distributions, but LFS is a whole order greater when it comes to time sinks. Gentoo automates almost everything that you would do by hand in LFS. Compile time doesn't count as it's not your time being used.