Preface:

I always had a rocky relationship with everything addictive, somehow
my brain really likes the idea of taking something that makes it
feel good / dizzy / relaxed and keep convincing me to not stop or
find creative explanations why - just for example - i today can
surely drink because it was a sooo much of a stressful day.
Regardless if i decided in the morning of the same day that i will
stay away from booze.

Over the last couple of months it got a bit out of hand... no, i
didn't do harmful stuff (at least not harmful to others), i was
never a "raging drunk" or something like that, i always functioned,
stood up in the morning, went to work, took care of wife, kid and
parents, but i noticed the amount i drank was growing (peaked at
about half a bottle of Whiskey in one evening) and that i noticed
effects on my health.  I gained a lot of weight (alcohol makes me
HUNGRY), slept like shit and started nearly every day with more or
less of a hangover. So, this needed to stop.

It was surprisingly easy. Yes, i have read the stories of people
quitting "cold turkey" and going into seizures and so on, but i
thought that i was only drinking in the evening, so my nervous
system at least had hours every day without being under the influence
of booze. Except of really bad sleep for a couple of days i didn't
noticed any ill side effects. And, surprisingly... i didn't crave
the stuff.

Now its about three weeks since my last drop of alcohol and somehow
this voice in the back of my mind is again trying to convince me
that i can easily start drinking again something to "come down" in
the evening, i had no problem stopping, so it would be no problem,
right?

Well... i don't like the idea of going back to bad habits too
easily, so i decided that i need something to occupy my mind during
the late evening hours when wife and son are already in bed and i
have this 1 - 2 hours of restlessness before i also can go to sleep.
To make a long story short: I decided to take a REAL deep dive into
Gentoo Linux



Installation

The download, writing to an USB stick and booting from the
minimal-live-iso is uncomplicated, network on the laptop i decided
to be the guinea pig for this experiment was detected and i ended
up in a shell with root access.

I started fdisk, removed the previous partitions and created a
simple layout with an 1 GB boot partition, 16 GB swap space and
the rest of the 1 TB drive for / .  After that i created - as guided
by the excellent installation manual - the necessary mount points,
downloaded a fitting stage3 file (i opted for the OpenRC version),
extracted it in /mnt/gentoo and set the recommended flags in
/etc/portage/make.conf

After that point i simply followed the - to say it again, excellent
- installation instructions, a thing that first bothered me a bit
was that the installkernel package pulled also a ton of dependencies.
At this point i was also about 1,5 hours into the install, with >
50 packages to go, so i let the system work while i myself went to
bed for the day.

In the morning of the next day the package installation was completed,
after work i continued the installation, installed a kernel (i
start out with a binary one... i will build a custom one after i
have a working system), installed and configured grub, did some
adjustments and, well, at the end of the second evening there was
this "magic moment" reached when you boot into a fresh system the
first time.

As i felt not like going to bed i started installing some console
tools, reading a bit through the documentation via Lynx and lurking
a bit in irc channels while the build process for X11 was running
in the background. What i personally really like about the Gentoo
ecosystem is the way in which the documentation is written, it
reads in a way that puts a big emphasis on helping a new user
getting a running system while also takes the necessary time to
explain the used commands and flags in depth or at least gives the
necessary references. The user is treated as an adult without
letting him fall into too obvious traps. With now having a working
system and the X11 build still running i concluded the second
evening.

In the next morning the build was still running, so i went to work
and didn't disturb the laptop on its tasks. The day went another
route than planned because the Kindergarten called and told me i
need to pick up junior because he developed a slight fever and
didn't feel well.  Lucky to have a workplace where i can leave
anytime i grabbed my mantle and headed back home. After i cared
for junior and had him asleep i risked a view at the laptop and
was satisfied that the build finished without any errors. As i
wanted to go a lean and minimalistic route with this setup i next
installed icewm, the build only took about 15 minutes. A quick
startx confirmed that the windowmanager was working as expected.

The rest of the day went by with various non computer related tasks
(mostly related to care for a ill-humoured child with a slight
fever and running nose), so that i went back to the system at around
22:00 CET. I installed and configured the necessary software packages
for sound and WiFi, created a few scripts to easily dock and undock
the laptop with my external monitor using xrandr, set up a graphical
login with slim and went to bed at around 24:00.

The next day was again completely child care oriented, but again at
around 21:00 i could continue my setup. I compiled / installed
Claws-Mail, Abiword and Gnumeric, made further adjustments at the
system configuration and at around 23:00 i finally had everything
in a state where i thought: "Yup, i can work with this.". I finished
the day with running "emerge --sync && emerge --update --deep
--newuse @world"...

In the next morning i was greeted with a successful update and an
quick reboot showed me that my configuration seems to be maintainable
enough.  Looks like i have now a working Gentoo system!

There ist still tons to learn and to deep dive into this for me
foreign distribution, what i can say for now is that i like the
different approach it takes.