Jumping in to parrot the arch install script advice. It's easy, has a fair amount of flexibility, and gives you a rock solid base to build on.
One other thing to mention once you've grown comfortable is looking into systemd-boot. I got fed up with dual boot issues and moving away from grub solved for them.
Best of luck.
Feels like Jabber has been around for a long time. If I'm not mistaken I remember my buddy pimping it as an AIM alternative back in the Napster/mp3 days.