Gather around kids, I'll tell you a story of the olden days. Back when it first came out I installed gentoo, and at the time the recommended process was to start from stage1. And of course I was a true believer and spent a lot of time optimizing cflags. I could get the base system running in maybe half a day, on the third try on average (I was distro hopping a lot). I used gnome at the time, and it wasn't that bad to bring it up. Less than 24 hours. But if you wanted openoffice (there was no libreoffice at the time), oh boy, you could say goodbye to your system for a good day and then some. Assuming that it didn't fail and then you had to change cflags, recompile half the system and try again. But man, when it finished the system would fly sooo smooth.