My experience was largely similar, although I suffered along with using lynx to read the documentation in e second virtual console as I was learning about partitions and compiler flags.

And after spending hours watching/waiting for gcc, bash and some of the other core utilities (and of course Linux) to compile my then limited experience also witnessed a panic on first boot :( so I switched to Lunar and had that on my laptop until I replaced it.

I too became lazy, but went for Arch instead of Ubuntu (which I did use before attempting Gentoo).

Might fire-up a VM and give this a whirl...