Published May 9, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT My love for computers started with a trusty Compaq back in 2005, and I haven't looked back since. This had me graduate into being an avid tinkerer, even if I end up soft-bricking stuff most of the time. I do also love video games. Gentoo Linux has always been a bit of a fascinating distro. With an initial release in March 2002, Gentoo has been in the Linux space for quite some time now, standing through the test of time and is still well-supported. Unlike Arch and most other Linux distributions, Gentoo is a source-based distro wherein users are expected to customize and compile every package. It sounds daunting (which it is, to an extent) but this trade-off is necessary to squeeze as much performance and optimization out of a system. I’ve previously used Arch Linux, so I had some idea of how the whole setup and installation process would work out. Or so I thought.…