What building Linux from source twice taught me
I have built Linux From Scratch twice, by hand: LFS 13.0 with systemd on kernel 7.0. Every package was compiled by me, with no package manager doing the work.
What it teaches
A normal install hides the order in which a system comes together. Building it yourself shows it: a temporary toolchain first, then a clean build of the base system inside a chroot, then the kernel and bootloader. When a build fails you read the error, find which dependency or flag caused it, and fix that, because nothing else will.
Why I do not live in it
Compiling every update from source is not realistic for daily work. I run Arch with the CachyOS kernel instead, and I use what LFS taught me when something breaks.
How it feeds my other work
Knowing how the pieces fit makes systems code less mysterious. It is part of why I am writing Rust for Wayland tools like rnetapplet, and why I want to move toward kernel driver work. The build log is in my lfs repository.