My first real experience with installing/running Linux on my own machine back in the day was with Gentoo. My experience was basically the same as Arch guy there, except with the added step of compiling every single component from source. On a Celeron equipped laptop. Nobody warned me about that part.
It took fucking ages. I was stuck in textmode land with Matrix code flying up the screen for like three fucking days, before I even got to a shell prompt.