Is anyone really wanting to get back into the business of building their own kernels? I started using Linux heavily in '92, and I've built a lot of kernels, and am quite happy to not be building them anymore.
It's easy (2-3 commands), takes like a minute on a modern machine with trimmed down kernel configuration, and you can customize the kernel to your liking (write/patch drivers, embed firmware blobs, fix things that are broken or missing). What's to hate? :)
Though I only do it for my ARM based devices currently.
And if you're not throwing away build artifacts after each build, then getting stable updates is just a `git pull` and incremental make, which is usually very quick.
I kind of liked compiling my own kernels. I felt I was better-connected to the state of things, and it was fun to see it all evolve from the vantage point of "make menuconfig".
But initramfs isn't so bad, and it allows things like ZFS root to have a modicum of smoothness and integration.
I build my own kernel. I did invest some time to select the right configuration, but now it's just a question of copying over the old .config and running "make". What's annoying about that?
I understand not wanting to. I have been compiling my own kernels since about 2008, I think. I have occasionally thought about switching to something else, but really it has only gotten better (faster) over time.
When I was young and spry, I used to compile them with every new minor revision. Now, it is just maybe a couple times per year. I think that cooling it on how often I do it has helped it not become annoying.
kernel compilation is easily automated. I don't want to do that and like the initramfs approach mostly because I like the fact I can take a hard drive out of a computer and boot the system on another one in case of a hardware failure.
That is a lot faster than recovering from a backup.
