[gunapologist99]

Spend a week (seriously it will take that long, especially if you've been doing this for a long time and want to customize everything and also haven't been in the gentoo scene for a while) and switch [back] to Gentoo. (don't go all the way to Funtoo, yet, even though syncing and profiles are probably superior)

if you know what `init 0` is then you'll be able to pick up on Gentoo and it'll be the new distro for the rest of your life. another excellent option is Void or Alpine (both of which I prefer on servers, but Gentoo makes a better desktop because it's incredibly flexible).

[Paul-Craft]

You ain't kidding. I literally spent a week bootstrapping (read: compiling everything, starting with gcc) Gentoo to get a basic desktop up and running, back when that was a supported thing to do.

Would I do it again? Nah, probably not. Am I glad I did it in the first place? Eh, I was young, had a spare machine, and a bit of a masochist then. But I did learn quite a lot in the process.

These days, I think the closest you can get to the experience I had is building your own Linux from Scratch distro.