LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc). This is not bad, but different. I am not a Gentoo user so please correct me if my assumptions are wrong. All these 3 options, however, encourage the user to familiarise themselves with the system internals, which is a good option if one wants to dwelve a bit deeper into linux. Arch is probably the most accessible of the lot.
The reason Gentoo forked udev is that they have a commitment to user choice. That is, you as the user gets to decide everything. If you want to use udev, fine, if you want something else, also fine.
So they created eudev because it was becoming more and more of a hassle to dig udev out of systemd for use with non-systemd installs.
And i think LFS has also adopted eudev for their "traditional" book now, because they ran into the same issue.
Something like this should really give pause for thought in the "init" debates, as it is a stark reminder that systemd has gone far beyond being just about init. And thus all those videos demoing systemd vs "random init of the day" boot times end up being a distraction rather than enlightening.
A good Arch alternative is Void Linux. It's almost like if BSD and Linux had a child. I've moved away from the "assembly-required" distros, but I had a lot of good fun playing with them and did learn a lot.
> Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc).
Gentoo offers even more freedom of customization than Arch. Choose your init system, your udev variant, your main Python version, set around 100 build time options for ffmpeg and so on.
LFS is great for learning and looking under the hood, but for a system that you actually use daily, Gentoo has no rival.
If customization is a goal I'd look into Nix(OS) as well. Source distro with binary caches for the default build options. Oh, and your setup becomes trivial to reproduce (just copy the config files). Oh, and you can easily revert your machine to a previously known working state if you screw something up.
Yes, but at the end of it all, you have a fully supported distro with Arch. And by "supported", I mean that there are regular updates for your packages, very good instructions to learn stuff, an excellent support forum, etc.
The ALFS side-project may be a nice way to bootstrap a new distro though. Basically it automates the process of building a LFS install via the use of scripts that parse the LFS book markup.
I'm following a distro, Gobolinux, that used that to bootstrap their latest release. And supposedly it took more time to get the Consolekit+polkit+whatever rigamarole working so it could offer a desktop.
Yeah, it's the most do-it-yourself but is pretty difficult if your not extremely comfortable with Linux. I tried to do it a few months back (without too much C knowledge) and couldn't figure out how to cross-compile/link libraries I needed. I got it to boot into a shell (without login). At this point, I could probably do it, but I prefer sticking with really minimal distros like CRUX and Void.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/