Build Your Own Linux Distro

If all you want is a web server or openssh server, then what you wrote is true. Try to just install DNS or email servers and you will see they are not coming ready configured.

Even with modern Linuxes, I need to script almost every week. So many tasks are not done automatically. Last week I made a script backuping all Extreme switches and Zhone dslams and other network equipment (ca 50 boxes). Now I have a crontab entry backuping them daily, so whenever one of those goes down I can quickly drop in another one.

As a system administrator I have to deal with huge amount of user names. Only a crazy person would add and remove them manually with either adduser from CLI or from any GUI. I created a script parsing a text file with all names. From that text file, my script generates usernames and passwords and After adding the user to the system, it outputs to a CSV file. That way I do not have to deal with mistakes and I save a lot of work.

Before that I had to make a box for presentations. The customer wanted to have an easy way to get PowerPoint presentations running on a screen at a library. I quickly installed Linux, made some simple scripts to do an automatic TTY login, startx, running mplayer in fullscreen cycling through all files which are accessable through samba. PowerPoint got a presentation->mpg4 export built in.

These are all trivial things, but nothing a complete newbie will be able to do after going through LFS. LFS is not teaching Linux. It is teaching how to install packages. If a newbie would run a distro with limited quantity of packages, like Slackware, he would have to learn it anyway, but rather than compiling the whole system he can begin learning real Linux (= becoming fluent in CLI, scripting, configuring services, etc).