I run gentoo on my second desktop machine.
Overall I'm happy with it , can be hard to manage for a beginner.
Yeah you break stuff and you learn , most of my learning has been and still is on arch, but I use various distro's.
Sometimes you just want to get shit done and a missing lib is not alway's fun
You will have to look into kernel compilation , which btw isn't as hard as it sounds but a skill to master.
Binary option seems kinda fishy.