Sadly is Linux is no longer what is used to be for my generation that cut their teeth having to patch kernels for basic hardware support.
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.
All I want is init scripts and X11, but the horizons are shrinking. I've already compromised with systemd, and I don't like it. I see BSD in my future, or at least a linux distro from the list here https://nosystemd.org/ - probably Gentoo. Nothing to stop me, absolutely nothing at all. I just need a few days free to backup/wipe/reinstall/reconfigure/restore_data and I'll be good. Better make that a few weeks. Maybe on my next machine build. It's not easy, but I build machines for long term use.
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.
SysV init was the overengineered cousin to BSD init and I never liked it. Easily my least favorite of all init systems I've worked with over the last 30 years. On the flip side, daemontools or maybe runit were my favorites. Lots of good options for init/supervision tooling over the years and SysV was not among them.
The proof in the end that SystemD is a cancer in the Linux ecosystem. Officially it is just a stack and you can decide to use another one if you don't like it. Unofficially RedHat money ensured that other critical stacks will depend heavily on it so that you can't easily swap without replacing the whole ecosystem.
> 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.
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.
It's a pity. It's also a step back from valuing the Unix philosophy, which has its merits, especially for those with a "learning the system from scratch" mindset. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for systemd.
> packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd
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.
That's funny, I did LFS a few years ago and specifically chose the systemd version so I could better understand it. I don't think this is a huge deal, I believe the older versions of the document that include SysVinit will still be available for a long time to come, and people who want it will figure out how to muddle through. If at some point in the future things diverge to such a point where that that becomes untenable, someone will step up and document how it is to be accomplished.
Modern mechanical engineers, to this day, learn the thermodynamics of steam engines. Not because they are living in the past, but because they are building foundation knowledge that will permeate everything they'll be doing in the future.
LFS should stick to academic pedagogy, instead of trying to compete in the Linux Distro space.
I was considering forking the base book and maintaining it, as I have kept an eye and occassionally built the project over the years (I use it a lot for package management/bootstrapping/cross compilation experiments), but it appears there already is one: https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/lfs-dev/2026-02...
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.
It's funny I did an LFS system of my own a couple of years ago which I coined "Head Rat" Linux.
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.
The saddest part of this isn't the technical debate. It's that a project whose entire reason for existence is to teach you how things work has concluded that one of the most fundamental components of the system is now too entangled with everything else to offer a choice. That's not a vindication of systemd or an indictment of it. It's an honest admission about what happened to the Linux ecosystem's composability over the last decade.
LFS. Brings back so many painful memories. But then, learned so much.
Man. I'd really rather they did the inverse: drop systemd and only maintain the SysV versions of the materials, even if that means dropping GNOME/etc., because I think understanding the Linux init process is far more important than making any specific desktop environment available.
From a completely technical standpoint, is systemd really better than SysVInit? I ask this question in good faith. I have used both and had no problems with either, although for personal preference, I am more traditional and favor SysVInit.
I hate it when a website assumes the language I'm speaking based on my IP. There is no apparent way to change it as well. It's just lazy and hostile design in my opinion.
Kind of related: The Great Debian Init Debate <https://aaonline.fr/search.php?search&criteria[sequenceId-is...>
This seems good? LFS isn't about building Linux the way Linux was built 40 years ago. It's about learning how to do today's Linux, from scratch. Steps that lead to a radically different build from most Linux distros are therefore off the mark, and not really educational to show how a modern Linux is built.
Lots of pearl clutching in here about it, tho
So this will be the final SysVinit version https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/12.4/
Why not discontinue original coreutils and original sudo while we're at it?
>The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd
Do people who really uses LFS even want GNOME or KDE on their system ?
Has the entire industry converged on Systemd then
"The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd that are not in System V."
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.
The UNIX cancer that is systemd has spread to LFS and kiled SysVinit.Sad
I ended linux from scratch support a long time ago. Well I did the right thing. Everything is systemd free on my side, for my own sake. This systemd is so much a "microsoft grade bad idea".
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 does "support" mean
Wow this is sad. If any distro keeps the old ways around it should be LFS or Slackware I would think. And maybe Gentoo.
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
Just rename Linux to SystemD OS at this point..
I had stopped using linux at the start of the systemd takeover (it was not because of systemd).
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?
This is a mindblower. To quote Bruce Dubbs:
''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.''