Is anyone really wanting to get back into the business of building their own kernels? I started using Linux heavily in '92, and I've built a lot of kernels, and am quite happy to not be building them anymore.
Though I only do it for my ARM based devices currently.
And if you're not throwing away build artifacts after each build, then getting stable updates is just a `git pull` and incremental make, which is usually very quick.
But initramfs isn't so bad, and it allows things like ZFS root to have a modicum of smoothness and integration.
When I was young and spry, I used to compile them with every new minor revision. Now, it is just maybe a couple times per year. I think that cooling it on how often I do it has helped it not become annoying.
Me too. I go back to within about 3 years of that.
But I expect my distro to handle this for me now.
If the distro compiled and updated the kernel for my hardware then there's be no need for an initramfs.
While initramfs was a simplistic kludge, the UKI idea does not fix it, it wraps a kludge inside a fugly ball of lack of understanding.
That is a lot faster than recovering from a backup.