Joined the club!

I'll re-member you.

Eh, youre not missing Much aside from setting flags and watching it compile. I don't think the performance improvements are significant enough at the point to bother. Though it was fun on some older systems.

Gentoo is fun to play around with but is not a daily driver at all.

Gentoo is a fun hobby tinker thing on some laptop you don't really care about. I will say kudos to people who do use it as a daily driver as they have way more time than I do and I envy them for it. If I had the the time to dedicate to it I would use it as a daily driver.

I am coming from mac, so I am relatively familoar with unix based systems. Its been fun so far.

Also, depending on the time of year, some E series models can drop to pretty low prices on clearance. E series used to suck, but they've upped the build quality and they're pretty good budget Thinkpads now. Most things should be swappable (check Hardware Maintenance Manual to be sure), so back in 2024, I was able to snap an E16 gen 1 with 8 GB RAM 256 GB and upgrade it to 24 GB RAM, 2 TB storage for not too expensive.

The really nifty thing about the E16s is they have dual NVME drive slots; I just kept the OEM 256 GB drive in it and eventually threw a Windows 11 LTSC install on it, as I unfortunately have to use Windows to do a few assignments, which luckily only come up every couple weeks, usually.

Yeah. You know the first time you install Arch (btw), and you realise you've not installed a working network stack, so you need to reboot from the install media, remount your drives, and pacstrap the stuff you forgot on again? Takes, like, three minutes every time? Imagine that, but you've got a kernel compile as well, so it takes about half an hour.

Getting Gentoo so that it'll boot to a useful command line took me a few hours. Worthwhile learning experience, understand how boot / the initramfs / init and the core utilities all work together. Compiling the kernel is actually quite easy; understanding all the options is probably a lifetime's work, but the defaults are okay. Setting some build flags and building 'Linux core' is just a matter of watching it rattle by, doesn't take long.

Compiling a desktop environment, especially a web browser, takes hours, and at the end, you end up with a system with no noticeable performance improvements over just installing prebuilt binaries from elsewhere.

Unless you're preparing Linux for eg. embedded, and you need to account for basically every byte, or perhaps you're just super-paranoid and don't want any pre-built binaries at all, then the benefits of Gentoo aren't all that compelling.

Are you running older hardware? Something Debian- or Fedora-based, or even "vanilla" Arch Linux might be more stable for you.

Regardless, that sucks. CachyOS has been great for me, as my first Linux distro install (just a few months ago) since my previous attempt around ~2007.

I gotta get the thigh highs, I only own ankle socks rn.