FreeBSD is nice and I’ve used it in the past and I have scripts to build programs o it. However, it’s really lacking a lot of the drivers that Linux has. I’ve had trouble getting it working with real world hardware. If you have to load the whole Linux portability layer with several libraries just to get a printer to work, why go FreeBSD when you could just run it on Linux? Then, you wouldn’t need many of the same libraries built for FreeBSD and for Linux on the same system. Unfortunately, when you introduce alternatives C libraries into the mix, you may still end up with issues with hardware compatibility especially if all the hardware manufacturer offers is a closed source driver. I’ve gone out of my way to buy hardware that says Linux compatible only to find out the drivers are binary files and only work with certain versions of Linux.
I’ve never gotten into using Gentoo. Slackware was very nice though. I liked it a lot. Might still be using it if it would have worked with my desktop PC, but I was having issues with their bootloader and not much luck trying to replace it with another bootloader.
I like the LFS motto of your system, your way. They also have great documentation and simplify how to get certain things built and working on Linux.
I do have a lot of bits and pieces of source I’d like to put together somehow. No real plans on how to accomplish that yet.
Appreciate the encouragement. I kind of just keep working on it for myself because I don’t really expect others besides myself to be interested. Would be fun to find a like-minded group to experiment with though.
Are you in the building stage of LFS? If so, then do you have the base LFS booting?
I have been playing with LFS for over a year now, and still, have yet to get Xorg working!!!
Do not ever see LFS doing what I can do with Gentoo!!!
Would be more than happy to share notes!!!
Sort of in the building stage. I go off script a lot. I’ve been experimenting with options like Shoebox Linux too.
It may be easier just to switch to Wayland than try to build Xorg. Although I do like some of the features of Xorg and I’ve been investigating options like TinyCore’s tinyx. I have Xorg building from source on Windows for something I’m using it for at work, but it’s an older version of Xorg. At one point, I had a lot of the Xorg libraries built with musl but don’t think I had the right drivers to get it all working right in Linux. I used to have problems getting Xorg to work even with precompiled distribution versions of it. I don’t always have the most compatible hardware even though I tried to buy things with Linux use in mind. I have built nano-x before and it worked fine.
I would love to compare notes. Should we start a separate thread for LFS style building distro components from source code?
@Laura_Michaels@ihasama
I have no problem with Xorg and Gentoo, and only need to build LFS and Xorg, if I go into building Xfce and Firefox.
I am still not a big fAN for Wayland!!!
The modern way would be to use a container, rather than a whole Linux.
Basicslly build a special environment for your apps, and wrap a container around it so you can move it between diverse systems.
Docker containers seem to be oriented towards one container for each app. That is not quite what you want here. You want a mini-OS for a group of special apps.
Many solutions are a sure path to insanity! Unless, of course, you have tiebreaker mechanisms and a well-vetted hierarchy. Possibly that hierarchy is based on ease of implementation, possibly based on stability.
Depending on your age, do you use 50-year shingles or metal roofing when re-roofing, or 20-year or tar paper?
Wait, isn’t that what Docker is exactly? Used to be able to choose Windows Core as your base OS, and Alpine is about as close to “Core” as you can really get in a Linux OS. Not sure if MacOS can be deployed in a Docker image, but it’s easy to do sandboxing, compartmentalization (process isolation) and containerization in Docker, and many penetration testers and other infosec professionals use Docker on a daily basis.
Canonical has a fairly new container option they call Chiseled containers. They have a tool that removes “slices” of a container you’ve built leaving only what is referenced by your application. The theory is pretty cool. We have not used this in production yet, but it does result in small containers with small attack surface. There is no bash, no wget, no curl, no ssh. Just the minimum requirements.
I remember discarding Void when I couldn’t figure out from the opening screen how to install it. For a new user, the first few steps must be intuitively obvious for anyone. For example, a desktop icon labelled ‘install to hd.’
Hard to think of Debian as anyone’s “new adventure” … that’s what Arch is for (or Void). I have much of the same checklist as @callpaul.eu but my affair with Manjaro was brief, when I discovered the dark side of AURs.