[thom_nic]

I agree, for a couple reasons. One, while you usually have to deal with a cross toolchain (usually intel-> ARM) it's easier to build and debug on a target board versus booting and rebooting your PC to see if you did everything right. Also the

I've used debootstrap to build a Debian distro for ARM with a custom kernel (for an Olimex board target or Beaglebone.) That's very hands-off and not nearly the same "depth" as LFS. The next step was taking the same kernel and building a busybox-based rootfs. Then I had to make my own PID 1 and do init work to bring up services such as networking on boot which was very educational, yet busybox provides most of the "lego bricks" that you're not left writing too much from scratch.

Building to an embedded target also allows one to punt on the most annoying and complex parts of a desktop linux distro, such as the desktop environment, audio/video drivers, UEFI bootloader, etc. Building a semi-custom (e.g. Arch or Debian/debootstrap, Buildroot or OpenEmbedded) headless distro was what I'd call a "shallow dive" or gentle introduction to more of Linux's inner workings without having to understand every bit in order to get a running system.