Good bye to LFS
by Keith Hedger from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6M0GD)
Having been a long time user of LFS as my main desktop, I have decided to throw in the tail and use a prebuilt distro ( Void, more on that later ).
I have always had a great deal of respect for the LFS devs, but it seem s LFS is rapidly going down hill, Version 10.1 was the last ( in my opinion ) well made version, every thing "Just worked".
I tried version 11.x and found with a bit of tweaking it was a reasonable system.
Version 12.0 was a nightmare and needed constant hacks and fiddling to get working, when the system was finally up and running I found all sorts of problems, with anything using the various web view packages, the gtk webkit I just couldn't get compiled, falkon had problems with websites, mostly dynamic content, videos etc, I gave up trying to build chromium and opted for a repacked chrome deb file, but still with visual problems.
I noticed that the devs had got lazy like many other distro devs and symlinked /bin and /lib to /usr/* I don't know at which version this was introduced but it's awful, one of the great things about Linux I found after starting to use it was the separation of user binary's and lib's etc, unlike windows and macos ( at the time ) that just dumped everything into a few folders, making debugging an errant install way more difficult than it need to be, and also compounding the problems of screwing up a folder, ( we ALL do it! ).
The Devs also elected to install packages via pip rather than using setuptools, even arch doesn't do this! It's just plain lazy, I also noticed creep in the basic system, installing a pip packager into the basic system is just wrong, put it in BLFS if you want but it doesn't belong in the main system, I found a number of other packages that needed patches from arch/slackware to build/function, but I did get it built and running and worked around the various problems, but it was a far from stable system.
Version 12.1 What a piece of crud! I think I first installed LFS at about version 6/7.x and have never had as many problems with the basic system, I managed to get it built/installed with no errors except passwd hung, so I figured I would sort that later so just copied my /etc/passwd files, and hey it booted, but no modules would load, so back t a fresh build, after 4 or five tries I have finally given up, the system builds but wont function, never did find out why passwd hung on confirm password, couldn't get modules to load, spent two weeks on this, still no go, so goodbye LFS, I learnt a lot but I pity anyone building a new version, they just wont learn much, and will end up frustrated.
So now a prebuilt system, first of course I tried going back to Slackware but unfortunately slack seems to be lagging a long way behind the rest of the Linux ecosystem, nice to see they haven't given in to that systemd crud, but too much of slack is too old, so I tried Void, to start it uses runnit as the init system, and some of you may remember a few of us here got runnit working well on LFS, ignored by the LFS devs of course, "Not invented here!" syndrome strikes again.
Void has a number of install options and a really nice bootstrap from a chroot, which is the method I opted for, and it went without a hitch, Void is not a "hold your hand" system like debian etc, so needs some knowledge, but it's package manager is fast and easy to use, I had forgotten how nice a binary package manager could be, it also doesn't drag in huge numbers of deps like some others, I have been using Void for about two weeks now and it's fast and stable, I would definitely recommend it.
I have always had a great deal of respect for the LFS devs, but it seem s LFS is rapidly going down hill, Version 10.1 was the last ( in my opinion ) well made version, every thing "Just worked".
I tried version 11.x and found with a bit of tweaking it was a reasonable system.
Version 12.0 was a nightmare and needed constant hacks and fiddling to get working, when the system was finally up and running I found all sorts of problems, with anything using the various web view packages, the gtk webkit I just couldn't get compiled, falkon had problems with websites, mostly dynamic content, videos etc, I gave up trying to build chromium and opted for a repacked chrome deb file, but still with visual problems.
I noticed that the devs had got lazy like many other distro devs and symlinked /bin and /lib to /usr/* I don't know at which version this was introduced but it's awful, one of the great things about Linux I found after starting to use it was the separation of user binary's and lib's etc, unlike windows and macos ( at the time ) that just dumped everything into a few folders, making debugging an errant install way more difficult than it need to be, and also compounding the problems of screwing up a folder, ( we ALL do it! ).
The Devs also elected to install packages via pip rather than using setuptools, even arch doesn't do this! It's just plain lazy, I also noticed creep in the basic system, installing a pip packager into the basic system is just wrong, put it in BLFS if you want but it doesn't belong in the main system, I found a number of other packages that needed patches from arch/slackware to build/function, but I did get it built and running and worked around the various problems, but it was a far from stable system.
Version 12.1 What a piece of crud! I think I first installed LFS at about version 6/7.x and have never had as many problems with the basic system, I managed to get it built/installed with no errors except passwd hung, so I figured I would sort that later so just copied my /etc/passwd files, and hey it booted, but no modules would load, so back t a fresh build, after 4 or five tries I have finally given up, the system builds but wont function, never did find out why passwd hung on confirm password, couldn't get modules to load, spent two weeks on this, still no go, so goodbye LFS, I learnt a lot but I pity anyone building a new version, they just wont learn much, and will end up frustrated.
So now a prebuilt system, first of course I tried going back to Slackware but unfortunately slack seems to be lagging a long way behind the rest of the Linux ecosystem, nice to see they haven't given in to that systemd crud, but too much of slack is too old, so I tried Void, to start it uses runnit as the init system, and some of you may remember a few of us here got runnit working well on LFS, ignored by the LFS devs of course, "Not invented here!" syndrome strikes again.
Void has a number of install options and a really nice bootstrap from a chroot, which is the method I opted for, and it went without a hitch, Void is not a "hold your hand" system like debian etc, so needs some knowledge, but it's package manager is fast and easy to use, I had forgotten how nice a binary package manager could be, it also doesn't drag in huge numbers of deps like some others, I have been using Void for about two weeks now and it's fast and stable, I would definitely recommend it.