You do have to know what you're doing. A complete OS has a bunch of components that work together. But an out of the box distro hides all that do you end up fiddling with incomplete knowledge.
Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).
Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).