I remember playing with Gentoo back in 2004-2005, going through the installation procedure from "stage 1" all the way through to the working system [1]
It looks like nowadays the handbook says just go from stage 3, which makes sense - compiling everything was kinda stupid :D
I made the mistake of hitting from stage 1 an `emerge world` on a Pentium 3 (I think? P4 at the very best) with a full Open Office and Firefox selection.
No idea how long it would take.
One week later I finally saw my new desktop!
I learnt a hell of a lot with Gentoo - only had a dvd and the magazine it came with stepping through the stage 1 install process. No internet connection to search for answers when things went wrong. Not my current daily driver but definitely some good memories!
It looks like nowadays the handbook says just go from stage 3, which makes sense - compiling everything was kinda stupid :D
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041013055338/http://www.gentoo...