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.

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.