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Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw's 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I'm planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
It's pretty maintenance free.
The following will make the experience a bit more seamless:
After you have "installed" Gentoo there will be quite lot of installing of different programs to build your own customized distro. However if you yse systemd you'd get quite a lot in one strike, since systemd contains a whole lot of the central core components, like system logger (journald). The other route is to use OpenRC and with it sysvinit or openrc-init and choose the rest of the components.
Asking your question (the one I'm replying to) at the Gentoo forums may give you better answers and tips how to build maintenance free setup.