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LFS, Crux, and Gentoo probably changed my life in profound ways 20 years ago. At the time, I thought I was kicking the tires on desktop Linux.

What I was actually doing was learning how to apply critical thinking in the real world. Every abstraction layer removed from a subsystem tends to require increased reasoning from the user. Maybe even a little ingenuity.

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Same for me, I think I first tried Gentoo. Becoming completely obsessed how to make my system as fast and stable as possible I did the LFS tutorial. Before all that I had been using SuSE and was so frustrated how long it took to boot (~1 minute) and how cumbersome it was to build from source. On Gentoo/LFS that was just a breeze.

Exactly. I could never get rpmbuild to do exactly what I wanted on RH/Fedora/SuSE but Portage on Gentoo was amazing.

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