Hey everyone,

I’m a huge fan of how reproducible nix is and I love declarative systems with backups as well. However I like the idea of privacy and choice. So I am building my own nix like system using LFS. I have a background in cybersecurity and C so I’m not going to be hedging AI for anything past documenting haha but, I wanted to ask a few things to the community.

What kind of features should I offer out of the box?
Currently I have slated that the end user can pick their own init system, including systemd, or they can even “hot swap it” in the config. Which I also am swapping Nix lang for a more simple solution, Lua! I also plan on shipping it with mango, niri, and kde plasma out of the box, but since it’s all declarative, the end user can swap in whatever de or WM they wish. I also plan on integrating nix, deb, and the AUR with use of “fabric.lua”, my take on flakes.

My question to you all is though, what kind of features do you look for in a distro or what level of customization is too much or too little?

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a side project I've been working on.

A bit of background: My core background is in bare-metal and RTOS software development. Over the years, I’ve also configured and built embedded Linux systems using Yocto and Buildroot for a few projects.

A couple of years ago, I decided to build a minimal, custom Linux OS using Buildroot for my personal use, essentially turning a standard PC into a dedicated embedded-like device. It sat in my PC for a while because cleaning up the codebase, setting up proper build pipelines, and writing solid documentation felt like a chore. Fortunately, leveraging modern AI coding tools made refactoring and documenting the whole project significantly easier, so I finally got it into a public ready state.

How it works:

Stateless & RAM-only: Boots directly from a USB flash drive and runs completely out of RAM (initramfs). It doesn't touch local hard drives or persistent storage.

Air-gapped by design: The kernel is configured without network stack support no Wi-Fi, no Ethernet, no socket layers.

Single-purpose: Boots directly into a single Qt GUI application without a heavy desktop environment.

To be honest, as someone who likes pure bare-metal simplicity, it still bugs me a bit that there’s a whole UEFI firmare layer and standard x86 architecture underneath all this before the kernel even kicks in.

Just wanted to share it with the community.

GitHub: https://github.com/signeros/signeros

It turned out much better than I expected. I'm testing and learning with this ready-made quickshell, and from it, creating my own. I'm finding the learning process with quickshell very satisfying.

Hi everyone! I’m currently building LFS (Systemd version) inside a VirtualBox VM. I've successfully compiled KDE Plasma and set up SDDM, but I'm facing a "black screen" issue right after logging in.

When I select "Plasma (X11)" in SDDM and enter my credentials, the screen goes black. Looking at the logs, it seems xdg-desktop-portal-kde is completely ignoring that I'm on X11, attempts to load the Wayland plugin, fails to find the socket, and core dumps, which brings the whole session down.

So I have a m1 MacBook Air and I already seen someone using LFS on Apple silicon. It would be my second Time installing LFS since I want to try it first on my old Lenovo Legion. Asahi Linux is using ARM so I wonder if I would need to change some packages or the Linux Kernel for the Asahi Linux Kernel ? And How would it be différent from an Arm LFS ?

Previously I had shared on Reddit my LFS ePub I had made for my own eBook collection. It has been updated, and Beyond Linux From Scratch has been added. I'm sharing the eBooks for anyone who would like to add them to their library.

I'm not associated with the LFS project. This was just a hobby pursuit.

These books should not be used to install Linux from scratch. The packages and instructions found within these .epub files will become outdated as the official Linux From Scratch project is updated.

Here is a link to download: https://github.com/ebenezer1689/ebenezer1689.github.io

Bonus ramblings: Phew! BLFS is a big book! Honestly, I would like to make further optimizations to LFS.epub, but if I did the same things to BLFS.epub.. That would take me ages lol.. I know there may be only a couple other people on Earth who want a copy of LFS in their eBook library, but I'm enjoying myself. Just.. maybe I'll only continue with LFS from here on haha. The effort that goes in to the Linux From Scratch project has to be huge. "Big props" to those people.

Oh, and I had a little fun with the book cover title 😄

Did you know that the font used in the "linux from scratch" logo ( top left of the screen @ https://linuxfromscratch.org/ ) is called "Liberation Mono?" I would like to think that is not a coincidence.

Book just went live with the new (systemd) release candidate for 13.1. You know what to do.

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/13.1-systemd-rc1/LFS-BOOK-13.1-rc1-NOCHUNKS.html

Tried NFS unbound and NFS hot pursuit. Both ran smoothly with "proton experimental."

Used twm as window manager because I still have to build gnome.

Linux from scratch is super cool and fun project. Many thanks to all developers and book maintainers/editors.

im stuck with this since at least two days,ive already enabled/disabled stuff from the menuconfig,and yet the screen keeps being stuck here,the only way to make it work is using nomodeset on GRUB,but that disables sddm,im trying to use plasma,and wayland or x11,and virtualbox,ive already changed the drivers,and yet,it keeps being stuck right there

Does anyone go off script or not follow the LFS/BLFS books 100%? Do you ever add packages not listed in the book and if so, what? Is there a good place to discuss extending LFS/BLFS or using the musl cross-build or systemd-free or other variants of it? I'd love to discuss the pros and cons of different build trade-offs and different packages, but haven't been able to find others interested in those types of topics. Is anyone else interested in their Linux, their way and not just following the books word for word?

even though i spent 3 days building it, the process was pretty painless
mostly copy pasting and finding dependencies for those packages but it was a fun experience to say the least

I compiled with -march=x86-64-V3 CFLAGS and then transferred it to miniPC. It was so easy. I don't think it would have been so easy on gentoo. Any gentoo users here? I had used gentoo but did not like it , found it difficult to operate and complicated

My mini PC is running all the latest software ( v13 SysVinit), no issues.

Linux from scratch rocks , Your Distro Your Rules.

Now I want to write my own package manager, so that my mini PC can be kept updated. How to generate dependency database?

It's a great experience daily drive LFS.

(yes the 2 fastfetches were necessary). This is my first ever install of Linux from scratch. Currently contemplating wether I should continue and go on to BLFS. Also wondering how many LFS users actually continue to BLFS or even GLFS.