Gentoo is fantastic for learning. It forced me to get intimate with internals I had no exposure to before. And I learned a lot of little tricks from it that accelerated my career. Or at least made it easier.

I’d try to find something a bit more beefy if you plan on compiling almost everything. And once you get it where you like it, take a backup or system image you can restore to. Because when it breaks, it’ll be a lot less painful to start over.

My old Thinkpads and even my first iPad had SIM slots. I kinda miss that as it’d be much more handy now. LTE and the precursors were painful to use at the time.