Even if you do compile your kernel, it really doesn't take that long on modern hardware. I just set up Gentoo on my main computer and the kernel literally took

Even if you do compile your kernel, it really doesn't take that long on modern hardware. I just set up Gentoo on my main computer and the kernel literally took five minutes to compile on an 8 core AMD FX-8300 with 12GB of RAM. I spent much more time configuring it, of course :-)