We’ve all heard the copypasta, “I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.” It’s a classic in the wider Linux community, and even people I know who don’t use Linux still know about it. Now, aside from the fact that GNU certainly plays a quieter role nowadays when a lot of the user experience is defined by their desktop, I’d like to prove that copypasta wrong.

I’m not doing anything that hasn’t been done yet, in fact I highly recommend checking out the Chimera Linux project, which is one of my hugest inspirations for this project, and one who’s design decisions I’m heavily relying on for this. So, this is less of a “greenfield” project than it could be, but here’s the gist anyways.

I am crafting a guide based off of LFS 12.4 to build a Linux system that doesn’t need to rely on old duct-taped design decisions from decades past. Where I can, I’ll be replacing components for a better (or simply more fun) system, including removing the glibc and gcc GNU base on which the majority of modern Linux systems still derive from.

For the record, this will not be a project based on hatred of any particular pieces of software, I will not condemn systemd like half the projects that choose to diverge from the “usual” tech stack of modern Linux. This is more like Chimera Linux’s take, or even Fedora’s modus operandi, in which I’m simply interested in building something with newer, or more unseen parts.

Oh, and for all you arch nerds, I will be making this system use pacman and paru, so you won’t have to give up your precious AUR.

This blogpost is only to introduce you to this project, but since you’ve made it this far, here’s a list of the current drafted lineup for this system:

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• Compiler and runtimes: Clang + LLVM
• C standard library: Musl
• Init system: Dinit
• Userspace: BSD tools & Rust rewrites
• Coreutils, find & diff: uutils
• Package manager: Pacman+paru with custom packages