@sullybiker Linux From Scratch was an *incredible* resource, I also havent touched that in decades, but it seems to still be chuggin along.

@sullybiker compiling your linker from source will really get the ol bones shakin ;)

@justizin KISS is cool too, I liked the clear-headed philosophy behind it.

@sullybiker just like, the unix philosophy KISS, or something specifically slackwarey?

@justizin Oh sorry, it's an actual project! https://kisslinux.org

@justizin I had a lot of fun with it, but lost a lot of time screwing about with the kernel config because Kiss encourages everything in kernel (no initramfs although it's optional) and it's a job to get the storage stack behaving

@sullybiker yah i remember those days on like my 486 and p166 being like, “oh it’s more efficient to build everything statically and have no modules” and now i think it would take a monumental effort to measure any difference.

@justizin I enjoyed things like busybox init and learning to get along with Sway which is pretty awesome once you figure it all out. I noted in the blog post though that even the creator of Kiss provides a flatpak build script which amused me no end, but he really dislikes dbus (so no bluetooth and some other limitations.) It's a nice exercise though.

@justizin I dread to think about a build now with a P166. It would be all night!

@sullybiker it was a much smaller kernel, but a couple hours was not uncommon IIRC.

@justizin I remember when Gentoo started providing binaries for things like Firefox and Chromium because people were just *over it*

@sullybiker yeah lol, “got a new water cooled rig to build firefox once a week” 🤣🤣

@sullybiker build time was ANOTHER reason to be super picky. i had a .config i carried around between machines that i spent many hours in menuconfig / test builds getting to a satisfactory place.

i was in menuconfig recently and i swear there are things that have been deprecated for over 25 years.

@justizin A few years back I used to use Slackware's config and suddenly the number of options after makeoldconfig (I think??) rocketed upwards so much I just chose the option to accept all defaults

@justizin It's been an inspiration in Slackware Multilib, that much I do know

@justizin It's a shame some shops don't encouraging packaging anymore, like Plex and occasionally the devs bundle a better package in their flatpack repos which isn't feature matched by the maintainers of distros.

@sullybiker most distros are maintained by volunteers except for internet servers and basic system utilities. as the developer of a package like plex, you can reach a much broader audience with something like flatpack or whatever.

personally, i’ve taken to building my own custom docker images for more and more of the software i use, i blow a bunch of my systems away frequently and i get nice isolation. if i want to use something that only works with a newer or older ubuntu, i can!