LFS isn't difficult from a logistics perspective; once ya have it running, it runs great, no bloat, linux exactly how you like it. WHen you need to maintain it (updating software) LFS becomes all too much work for one person. I can imagine LFS being really freaking handy if you ran a Linux computer lab of 100+ identical computers and could just change one and clone it to all the others, where rolling your own distro would be ideal performance-wise. Of course, nobody runs a 100+ computer lab alone, so that's a factor too;)
Installing from source is *precisely* what made me love Gentoo. The fact that I can optimize everything to the exact processor type and optimize things based on the fact that I'd gladly waste memory to get more speed (I can pop another DIMM in there for cheap, processor...well, not so easy). Updating it is time consuming, especially if you put it off and don't update in a few months, and then have several hundred ebuilds to update, and need to fix the portage tree up a bit to fix some version rot. But generally, I can update the boxen at night when I sleep, have the output piped to a file, and read that file at work for anything interesting. Can't spend my *whole* day at work reading/. after all:D Problems happen, but that's the rocks with any linux distro.
The learning curve is hard, especially on the install, but if you read the gentoo forums from time to time, ya tend to see very few total idiot questions, like "how do I install internet explorer". The distro kinda has a builtin idiot-filter by having such an intimidating install process. Being a seasoned linux person, I love being able to choose to use the Intel compiler instead of GCC from the very start on my laptop. (Side note, stuff compiled with GCC 4 is *much* zippier than stuff compiled with Intel's compiler on my P4 HT 3.2GHz laptop).
I started with running linux "for real" (that is, outside of a VM, as a real, permanent OS on my box) with RH6 way back when. I stayed with RH until the great "piss of everyone with [gnome+kde=bluecurve]" scandal...they still have me drawing a blank on how THAT math works...anyway, after that, I was having to have so much junk on my system to do basic things with it without waiting forever for apps to load.
After RH did this mess, I went to mandrake linux, but wasn't happy there either: it has almost the same level of bloat. And RPM hell. Don't get me started on that -- I've spent hours fixing rpm dep problems after deciding to try the "development" yum repos on FCx boxen. Why there can't be a "yum downgrade" option...
After 2 months with Mandrake (I give every distro at least 2 months to learn it's idiosyncrasies before I toss it out of rage or sheer disgust) I tried slackware. It wasn't as shiny as the other previous distros I'd tried, but I figured what the hell and got it up and running. After a week and a half of my slack box up and running, a friend of mine asked me to help fix his gentoo system. He gave me root on his box because he was about to reformat it anyway. The machine was on it's last leg -- the entire HD was such a mess that I told him to back the machine up and we'll reinstall it. I tried to talk him into FC2 (at the time) but he persisted in Gentoo. I thought he was off his nut until I actually installed it. I've been a gentoo user since then and never looked back.
I have one FC4 box that I use for my router at home, which is only that way because I need fast updates without too much risk of things breaking. Since the system doesn't have X on it, it doesn't seem to have any problems with RPM's with the exception of openssl being the breaking point for just about every pkg on the system.
Otherwise, my amd64 desktop, my HTPC box, my #2 computer at work, and my Dell Inspiron 5150 all run Gentoo exclusively. I even have an iPaq running familiar+GPE that talks to all my boxen without any problems:). The laptop is a slight exception: it has vmware on it to run windows when some jerkwad just HAS to give me code in one of those.HELL languages with LoseForms that Mono+GTK# can't work well with. I think it's a bit of irony that I went from a windows user with linux in vm's to the exact opposite.
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LFS isn't difficult from a logistics perspective; once ya have it running, it runs great, no bloat, linux exactly how you like it. WHen you need to maintain it (updating software) LFS becomes all too much work for one person. I can imagine LFS being really freaking handy if you ran a Linux computer lab of 100+ identical computers and could just change one and clone it to all the others, where rolling your own distro would be ideal performance-wise. Of course, nobody runs a 100+ computer lab alone, so that's a factor too ;)
/. after all :D Problems happen, but that's the rocks with any linux distro.
Installing from source is *precisely* what made me love Gentoo. The fact that I can optimize everything to the exact processor type and optimize things based on the fact that I'd gladly waste memory to get more speed (I can pop another DIMM in there for cheap, processor...well, not so easy). Updating it is time consuming, especially if you put it off and don't update in a few months, and then have several hundred ebuilds to update, and need to fix the portage tree up a bit to fix some version rot. But generally, I can update the boxen at night when I sleep, have the output piped to a file, and read that file at work for anything interesting. Can't spend my *whole* day at work reading
The learning curve is hard, especially on the install, but if you read the gentoo forums from time to time, ya tend to see very few total idiot questions, like "how do I install internet explorer". The distro kinda has a builtin idiot-filter by having such an intimidating install process. Being a seasoned linux person, I love being able to choose to use the Intel compiler instead of GCC from the very start on my laptop. (Side note, stuff compiled with GCC 4 is *much* zippier than stuff compiled with Intel's compiler on my P4 HT 3.2GHz laptop).
Gentoo got me!
:). The laptop is a slight exception: it has vmware on it to run windows when some jerkwad just HAS to give me code in one of those .HELL languages with LoseForms that Mono+GTK# can't work well with. I think it's a bit of irony that I went from a windows user with linux in vm's to the exact opposite.
I started with running linux "for real" (that is, outside of a VM, as a real, permanent OS on my box) with RH6 way back when. I stayed with RH until the great "piss of everyone with [gnome+kde=bluecurve]" scandal...they still have me drawing a blank on how THAT math works...anyway, after that, I was having to have so much junk on my system to do basic things with it without waiting forever for apps to load.
After RH did this mess, I went to mandrake linux, but wasn't happy there either: it has almost the same level of bloat. And RPM hell. Don't get me started on that -- I've spent hours fixing rpm dep problems after deciding to try the "development" yum repos on FCx boxen. Why there can't be a "yum downgrade" option...
After 2 months with Mandrake (I give every distro at least 2 months to learn it's idiosyncrasies before I toss it out of rage or sheer disgust) I tried slackware. It wasn't as shiny as the other previous distros I'd tried, but I figured what the hell and got it up and running. After a week and a half of my slack box up and running, a friend of mine asked me to help fix his gentoo system. He gave me root on his box because he was about to reformat it anyway. The machine was on it's last leg -- the entire HD was such a mess that I told him to back the machine up and we'll reinstall it. I tried to talk him into FC2 (at the time) but he persisted in Gentoo. I thought he was off his nut until I actually installed it. I've been a gentoo user since then and never looked back.
I have one FC4 box that I use for my router at home, which is only that way because I need fast updates without too much risk of things breaking. Since the system doesn't have X on it, it doesn't seem to have any problems with RPM's with the exception of openssl being the breaking point for just about every pkg on the system.
Otherwise, my amd64 desktop, my HTPC box, my #2 computer at work, and my Dell Inspiron 5150 all run Gentoo exclusively. I even have an iPaq running familiar+GPE that talks to all my boxen without any problems