Years ago, while I was a poor students I compiled Gentoo on an overclocked Celeron CPU at whopping 533 MHz. Took literally 3 days to get to a functioning KDE desktop.

Worth every second, especially because it was winter and the dorm room was cold. My friends appreciated it too, they nicknamed my desktop “the reactor” for all the warmth it provided compiling all the damn time.

Has no one here ever worked on a new project or even a new feature in a decently sized codebase? Working exclusively in maintenance / minor change mode has to be exhausting.

I recommend distrobox for adhoc distrohopping. Though for Nvidia stuff it links to drivers and cuda that you have installed on your host, so… I recently needed cuda 11.8 and that was hella fun to get going.