The initial setup in Gentoo is definitely the hardest part but once stuff works, it seems to work until the end of time. With the kernel, manual configuration

The initial setup in Gentoo is definitely the hardest part but once stuff works, it seems to work until the end of time. With the kernel, manual configuration more or less is the following: 1. emerge sys-kernel/gentoo-sources 2. Configure the kernel with "make menuconfig". Manual configuration is just turning on the stuff you need and turning off the stuff you don't. If you don't know what it is, either look it up until you do or leave it as default. 3. "make && make modules_install && make install". 4. Add any kernel modules to /etc/modules-load.d/ If you don't want to configure the kernel yourself(seriously would recommend learning to do this, it is surprisingly easy and once you do it once, you just tweak your config as necessary), you can use genkernel to automate the process. Running genkernel should work in almost every case unless you have some kind of esoteric hardware you need to support. I think you just need to run "genkernel all" nowadays to do a full genkernel config, build, and install. As for X11, I definitely remember fighting with it a bit initially but nowadays it is supposed to essentially work out of the box more or less like this: 1. Add your GPU and input devices to /etc/portage/make.conf with "VIDEO_CARDS=", "INPUT_DEVICES=", and add X to your use flags. 2. Install xorg-server, xorg-drivers, and test it with xstart. Everything should work out of the box on most hardware. 3. Install your desktop/display manager of choice in portage and follow the wiki steps in the docs for said manager. For most of them this should essentially just involve enabling the services in OpenRC or Systemd. No idea about wayland but that's mostly just because I haven't been able to be bothered with moving away from X11 for any good reason.