LFS takes the opposite approach. You build a cross compilation toolchain, build out a full Linux file system, compile a massive number of packages… it’s almost two days of work before you even start thinking about a boot loader.

This tutorial gets straight to the heart of the matter. Get a system that boots asap and then add complexity as you discover the shortcomings.

This seems like a much better pedagogical approach for someone not sure how the kernel works or what initramfs is, etc…

i once sat down to go through this as a challenge, but started to get bored quickly. skipping ahead, i built bash, configured grub to init=/bin/bash, threw in coreutils, and was very thrilled to see my very own "distro" boot in under a second (not counting bios init ofcourse) on an ancient p3 box.

i think i disabled everything i could think of in the kernel (including filesystem support, which was quickly rectified) for a truly 'minimalist' experience.

it ofcourse didnt do much but it was very responsive.

Same here, I tried it on a 486 and it became an idle game. Just glancing on it from time to time, lines are still running down the screen, OK, move on to other things.

u-root is mentioned in the article -- I used buildroot and busybox for embedded Linux development while in university: https://buildroot.org/

LFS has been on my todo list for like a decade, I really need to plan a weekend and just do it

I did it once, about twelve years ago, just to prove to myself that I could.

It was kind of fun, but I have absolutely no desire to do it again. I tried running it as my "full time" distro but what I ended up with was something extremely fragile and decidedly not fun for me to use.

Nowadays I run a NixOS Minimal install, which is about the level of operating system that I like to work in.

I think it's a month thing rather than a weekend thing, no?

Depends on your CPU (due to all the compiling), and if you plan on only doing the base OS or the extended plans too.

You and me both!