Once every coupla-few years I take a Journey - walk a Path of Pain, if you will. It always starts at the same place: the gentoo.org Downloads page. I grab my ISO, thinking to myself “Surely, this time it will be better. My machine has more cores and RAM now than ever before, compilation should be fast, I’ll bet they’ve improved the overall ergonomics of the experience, …” etc.
And so, I set off partitioning disks and creating filesystems and setting USE flags and things, and get down to compiling…
…and then, 12 hours after that it won’t boot because I forgot to install the bootloader.
…and then, 12 hours after that my graphics driver didn’t get compiled because I forgot to do the needful for accepting non-free licenses.
…and then, 12 hours after that the desktop environment won’t fire up because I forgot some configuration option for the window manager.
…and then, after N cycles (where N has been as large as perhaps 10, in my younger days), I say “Screw this, it’s simply beyond the ken of Mere Mortals” and give up. I go back to whatever OS I was using before and move on with my life. It stings to admit defeat…but I’ve got Shit to Do.
Ah, well.
Maybe Next Time.