Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags… Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn’t do that again.
I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.
Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.