Okay, I know this sort of question gets asked of almost all the distro's out there, but I am curious about this comparison for the sake of 'really learning' Linux as opposed to simply getting it to run with minimal brian power.

Both distro's seem to offer the same learning curve potential, but I am curious to hear what others think that may have already made the comparison themselves.

Thanks everyone.

A question of taste.....I think I had better performance with LFS, but really was hard to see a difference once the system was up and running. Although I like BSD ports, so gentoo gets a plus there. Another thing to consider, is the availability of the LFS book (ie alot of ink and paper) vs the documentation on the basic gentoo cd. Give em both a try is my suggestion!

The main difference though I see is with Gentoo, its doing alot of the work for you. You run the one command to emerge packages to install. With LFS your compiling everything yourself, your creating your boot scripts and totally customizing your system to your specific needs when following along the book, etc.
Both are similiar in particular ways but really they are totally different when you get down and dirty with them.

Cheers.

Thanks for the input.

After looking into LFS further, it seems to be a very worthwhile endeavor for someone that wants to know Linux completely. Besides, now that winter is here, what better way to spend those long cold nights!

I installed LFS 5.0. It was the best damn system I ever worked with. Every thing worked and worked well.
But then disaster struck: hard drive corruption, just when I was finished with every thing. And mean every thing. I even installed kde, which only took about, oh 5 hours, not counting installing qt first.
Now I'm tryning gentoo, see how that goes.

I prefer LFS-based systems. My problem with Gentoo is exactly the reason that it is so good. There is too much opacity in your interaction with the OS. They are nowhere near the way that, say, Mandrake hides things from users - I just prefer the unadulterated transparency that LFS offers. If I used another distro, it would be Gentoo or Openwall... but I will stick with LFS-based systems.

Gentoo really doesn't require much knowledge at all. you just need to be able to read.... type what it says in the installation guide and once installed it's often even easier to use than redhat....

Exactly, I am not even close to a linux guru, but I installed gentoo. I am able to follow step by step directions. Setting up alsa, printing was a breeze with gentoo, again, I just followed the docs step by step. Without question Gentoo has the best documentaion around. I also like the fact Gentoo seems to have a great community, always contributing and keeping it up to date. Gentoo will be my primary system as far as I can tell.

I just started LFS a few days ago. I have everything downloaded, I will start building it soon. I am kind of excited. I will do my best not to ask a question that I can find myself(my first impulse is to post, BAD HABIT). I hope to learn more about linux, thats why I am doing LFS.

I hope I do not get a lot of compiling errors, they look like a strange language to me, someday that will change.

I have LFS on my desktop machine and Gentoo on my laptop (I needed a system up reasonably quick..)

I had what I considered moderate knowledge of linux before LFS on my desktop and I feel like I learned 800% more about EVERYTHING in linux. In addition LFS requires you to compile everything by hand with ./configure && make && make install (or eqivilant). This means that you know everything that is on the system...you compile all the dependencies, and then whatever you want. This can be a blessing or a curse - on my laptop (gentoo) - I have gnome compiled and installed because that was a dependency for Evolution - for LFS I gave up because Evolution had like 80 dependencies. Its up to you

Back to gentoo - if something is not in the portage tree - you're SOL, you'll have to compile and install everything by hand - in addition the BSD method of init scripts is very different (at least a little different) than the SYSV init scripts we are all used to. That means the default scripts that come with things like mysql won't just work out of the box.


My thoughts, leaning toward LFS, but gentoo is awesome too, just stay away from mandrake (buggy/no control )
-Chris