If you plan on using something like Gentoo, building Gentoo and running it in a VM a couple times tends to be a smart play.
I've been using Gentoo for ages, as I'm a stickler for stripping down everything to its bare minimum and even I tend to first have a couple runs at building and running it on new hardware, from within a VM.
Going in knowing the intimate details of the hardware you use is always going to be a big plus.