> I did it once manually over a couple of days.

Sounds like a speedrun of the tutorial. How did you approach packaging then and what system did you use to compile everything?

I did the tutorial in the late 2000s I think and it took me 4-6 months if I remember correctly. At the time I wasn't completely new to Linux but setting up things like the boot loader was quite tricky for me.

For me the main motivation was getting a deeper understanding, being able to fine tune and customize my system. Of course I didn't go blindly through the tutorial but only did steps that I understood. (In case something goes wrong) Also I started to use (x)stow for everything.

It is possible to do it over a few days really, even with not too much knowledge.

Requiring four months seems as if it was a side project, which is of course totally fine, but for any main task it really should not take more than a few days, even on a semi-slow computer (well, depends on how slow).

I did it in a VM took me 20 hours. Most of that time was waiting for things to compile and fixing mistakes I made because I didn't read the instructions properly.