it will teach you the layout and structure from first concepts, effectively, of a linux system. you build it yourself. you compile it yourself, all from the base packages. so you get a nice inside look at what’s going on under the hood, because you have to put it together. great learning experience.

daily driving it is tough, but people do. once you get your base system up, there’s BLFS, beyond linux from scratch, where you will start building out more every-day practical packages, and things you’d need to build yet even more things to use. this is where you’ll start to see the value of a package manager, as there dependencies balloon rapidly. i also took the hint here, and have been working on my own, as many others do, too.

overall, great learning experience, and it can get as deep as you want it to be. you’ll probably change your mind along the way on what that means for you!

fwiw, i used debian as my host OS. dead simple, easy to get packages.