This machine already runs two operating systems off one disk, sharing one EFI System Partition. Adding a third meant writing to that same shared partition and to the machine's live EFI boot configuration — real, hard-to-reverse changes on hardware two other working systems depend on, not a fresh disk with nothing to lose.
Twenty files in one KDE package needed the same fix: remove an unconditional include of a header that doesn't exist on this system. Patching all twenty by hand looked avoidable. One upstream flag, flipped the other way, looked like it would satisfy the missing header everywhere at once. It didn't — and the reason it couldn't is more specific than "it didn't work."
The standard way to get wifi firmware onto a from-scratch Linux system is to clone linux-firmware, the upstream repository that bundles binary blobs for essentially every wireless chip Linux supports. It's several gigabytes.
A kernel build that copies its starting configuration from an already-working system inherits that system's scale along with its settings.
A previous attempt at building this system from scratch failed at wifi — a real driver problem that killed that attempt outright. This time, the kernel config started from the one place guaranteed to already have that driver working: this exact machine's own currently-running Ubuntu kernel. That choice fixed the wifi problem completely.
A build flag meant to turn off X11 support gets added to nearly every KDE package script in this from-scratch build — 128 of roughly 150. It's a real, documented flag. It's also, for most of those packages, not the flag that actually controls anything.
Three unrelated packages on this from-scratch Linux build each shipped with a real, working-looking installation that was actually missing a feature — the same feature, in every case, for the same reason.
The first time KDE Plasma actually started on this from-scratch build, the desktop came up. Windows opened, menus dropped down, dialogs drew where they were supposed to. Every piece of text in every one of them was a small square — a tofu box, the placeholder a font renderer shows when it has no glyph to draw. The bug wasn't in Plasma at all.
Building a Linux system from scratch means writing your own GRUB entry, which means picking how the kernel finds its root filesystem. The obvious choice, root=UUID=<filesystem-uuid>, is what nearly every guide on the internet uses. It's also exactly wrong for a kernel with no initramfs, and the panic it produces looks like a completely different bug.
This VPS runs three sites. Two of them — this one and carmen-crm.net — each have three nginx config files in sites-enabled. The third, fasterwebsites.net, has six.