The point of doing it is to understand how Linux hangs together, to remove the mystery in the wiring. I don't think it's worth pursuing to a GUI, unless you ha

The point of doing it is to understand how Linux hangs together, to remove the mystery in the wiring. I don't think it's worth pursuing to a GUI, unless you have a burning desire to customize or fix brokenness in that experience you've had on other Linuxes. The point is definitely not to continuously manage your own distro you built from scratch, unless that's your job or hobby. I use the knowledge I gained from the experience to debug many random instances of brokenness on Linux, both personally and professionally. It also made compiling from source a fairly comfy option when necessary (e.g. you need to fork, or backport a piece of software).