Linux

LSF is not a distro. It is a instruction manual and teaching aid. Don't use it as a base for you main OS. And IMO Gentoo does not really teach you more then Arch does. It gives a bit of flexibility that not many care about (how things are compiled) at a very big cost (of having to compile everything yourself). I would not use either unless compiling things is your hobby.

Sure, try them in a VM if you really want to. But I would not really consider that moving on from your current distro nor do you really need to do that.

LFS is a classroom. The point is to learn.

For getting work done, use a distro that meets your needs, and has a community you respond to.

Gentoo is great if you're constantly on the outskirts of the garden.

Gentoo. Use Gentoo and keep your sanity

LFS is not a distro, it's a book that teaches you how to build a Linux system from the ground up.

By all means do it at least once because you can learn a lot from it, but it's not meant to be used as a daily driver, unless you have nothing else to do in your life than keeping it maintained.

I agree with everyone here, if you want learn stuff than LFS is amazing, I encourage everyone to go through it at least once. But it's not a daily driver, if you want a daily driver stick go with Gentoo or stick with Arch.

As a long-time Gentoo user, I can tell you that it's perfectlly capable of producing both a useful gaming rig and a useful server, provided you have some idea of what you want to end up with.

Proprietary nvidia drivers should be straightforward enough: emerge nvidia-drivers and blacklist the nouveau module (or compile a custom kernel that doesn't contain it). You'll probably want to read what the Gentoo wiki has to say about Steam.

Good luck.

If you want to learn more then do LFS. I don't think Gentoo teaches you much more than a manual Arch install. But very few daily drive LFS. It's hardly practical. Gentoo is daily drivable but if you don't care about compiling all your own packages then I don't think it's for you.

I'd say just do LFS on an old laptop or a VM.

You shouldn’t do either.

You’re setting up a server and a gaming computer. Arch is about as out in the weeds as I would go to accomplish those goals. Both applications are focused on stability and reliability and compiling from source for lfs has a bunch of hidden gotchas that make doing anything a hassle. Not compiling from source also ends up causing you a pile of heartache when the binary you get doesn’t include support for a library you’re using or the version is incompatible or any number of other screw ups that can happen.

If you have a spare computer and just wanna see if you can do it or learn how it works then lfs is the way to go but if you actually want to provide some service or game then don’t switch.

Can I chime in for NixOS? Give it a shot. Truly next level.

If you are wanting to learn more Linux internals AND create something maintainable, you can create your own distro using Yocto/Bitbake. LFS teaches you all about Linux internals, but kind of leaves you to twist in the wind afterward. I would argue that Yocto exposes those internals AND gives you the ability to maintain the distro you've created (roll your own packages, pull in kernel patches/versions/modules, scan for applicable CVEs, etc.)

Or Gentoo sounds cool. Maybe an easier intermediate step before rolling your own.

Gentoo is a distribution that can be used as daily driver (I've been doing it for years!), while I think of LFS as more of a learning project.

I suggest LFS if you want to learn the complexity of creating a distro from scratch. (You might not succeed on the first try. I gave up multiple times before forcing myself to finish it)

I never tried Gentoo so I can't really say anything good or bad about it.

My question is: what are you expecting to learn from this? you say "learn more" but what exactly do you want to learn? Because if it's "becoming better at linux" you can definitely do it with just Arch.

If you just want something "more difficult" to install, I guess you can do it.

I think you don't understand what LFS is. It is not a distribution you move on to, you build it from the ground up yourself following instructions and understanding how it works. Gentoo does all of that for you, you just have a ready to go distribution where you compile applications from source; you can even use binary builds to avoid compiling complicated and big apps.

For gaming, Ubuntu's got the strongest support.

Why do I know that?

Because I tried running Steam on .. perhaps openSUSE or Void, & was told by Steam that they only support Ubuntu.

Since then I've read that they support others, but it was only a few years ago where they told me they only backed that one.

Linux Torvalds has spoken on how you simply can't make an app that will work on all distros: it isn't possible.

Gentoo would except for that kind of compatibility probably be your highest-performance OS, since you can intentionally include ALL of the CPU-optimizations which test to work best for you.

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