I built LFS like back in 2005 or something. I remember it took forever. I wonder if it's faster or slower now. My computer is definitely faster, but I also have a creeping suspicion the code has gotten a lot bigger. Then at some point I switched to gentoo. I remember I vacillated between gentoo and slackware. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
Significantly faster. A few months ago, after building a new rig for the first time in 6 years or so. I did a gentoo build from minimal to gnome, as exercise/burn-in/cooling testing. With the amount of RAM and cores available now compared to 2005, an 'emerge -e @world' only took a few hours vs the days and days it took back then.
Same, I used LFS for a couple months in college until I got annoyed about manual updates and switched to Gentoo. And back in those days you had to do it on actual hardware, not a VM. I had a job interviewer at the time who asked which Linux distro I used, and it was fun to tell them about that.
I would definitely recommend going through LFS to anyone maintaining Linux systems, it really helps you understand how things work.
