''As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files. Yes, systemd provides a lot of capabilities, but we will be losing some things I consider important.

However, the decision needs to be made.''

Linux is now effectively systemd/linux, and is attempting to become flatpak/systemd/linux through various corporate sponsored initiatives. The only thing worse, in my eyes, are people who distribute things as docker containers.

The Linux distro as such is becoming an anachronism. There’s no real place to innovate without the inertia of choices made by external projects being enforced on you.

I think it’s a generational change. My generation had Microsoft to contend with, and so sought certain freedoms, but this generation has walled gardens and AI to contend with, so freedom à la Microsoft seems okay and so Linux is being Windows-ified, while Windows itself becomes its own abomination.

As for Linux from Scratch - This is something that's been on my radar, but without the part I'm truly interested in (learning more about SysV) then I'm less inclined to bother. I don't buy the reason of Gnome/KDE - isn't LfS all about the basics of the distro than building a fully fledged system? If it's the foundation for the other courses, but it still feels weak that it's so guided by a future GUI requirement for systemd when it's talking about building web servers and the like in a 500Mb or less as the motivation.

Systemd is basically the Windowsfication of Linux. I'm always surprised by the people that champion it who also used to shit on Windows with the registry or whatever.

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing.

So drop them. There are other desktops that are faster, simpler, more stable, and aren't hard-coded to make Linux worse. Has everyone forgotten the design principles that made Linux good in the first place? Tightly coupling your software into other software is simply bad design. At some point you need to eat the cost of a looser abstraction to make your system less fragile, easier to reason about, and more compatible.

LFS should stick to academic pedagogy, instead of trying to compete in the Linux Distro space.

I believe maintaining the base book is the most important part, BLFS has some really good hints but a very significant amount of packages have few differences, collecting these in a separate hints file or similar would help a bit, at least for things that don't hard-depend on systemd like gnome.

Do people who really uses LFS even want GNOME or KDE on their system ?

I remember LFS from way back in the day.

What do we all think the overlap between LFS users and Gnome or KDE users is? I think it's pretty small.

I used the SVR4 packaging system from heirloom-pkgtools (using this of a Claude port of V4 unix to x86_64 as well at the moment) for fun, and compiled up CDE on top of this to boot. I wanted to see what Linux would look like if you dressed it up as much like SVR4 as possible. I liked the result actually. It was kind of like what Sun might have done if they dumped their own kernel and switched to Linux instead.

Originally it used SysVinit, and I started working getting systemd to work with it (because after several years I've come to appreciate it) - but that's the point I stopped working on Headrat - I realised if I wasn't adding SVR4 stuff and was removing it instead, it wouldn't be SVR4 enough.

I don't know how I feel about it - after all I could do an LFS straight out of my head these days without referring to the LFS docs - but I do feel there is something lost when as a Linux community, we try to shove the baggage under the rug and pretend that things like SysV init didn't play a massive part in Linux's rise throughout the 90's and 00's.

History is important, even if we don't like the code today and have more capable tools. But I guess SysV init is deader than dead at this point.

Lots of pearl clutching in here about it, tho

I'm honestly worried about the forces pushing systemd in Linux spoiling the BSD ecosystem. And I'm worried that the BSDs do not have enough people to forge alternatives and will have to go along with the systemdification of everything. sigh

*Note, I ended up on Cachy, which is systemd, so I'm not some pure virtue signaler. I'm a dirty hypocrite :P

There is still interesting code patches here and there, and interesting info on brain damaged SDKs (gcc, glibc, etc).

Most of the time I remove the SDK itself, basically I write a linear and brutal shell script with fine grained control on the compiler/linker. I do push down to nearly remove completely the compiler driver (a spectacular failure) namely CPP->C->ASM->O.

I would like to move away from ELF too for a modern file format for dynamic libs and executable, but the "geniuses" using complex computer languages (mostly c++) for critical open source components make that a massive pain (runtime, ELF relocation requiring obsolete infrastructure, etc).

What I don't understand is how this has happened. I didn't care either way but everybody who did seemed to really fucking hate systemd. Then how come it became the default in so many distributions, with so much opposition from the community?