I don’t get them putting Mint down either, and I’ve built multiple Gentoo systems… I don’t need an easy distro but still use Mint and like it for what it brings (basically, it’s Green Ubuntu, what Ubuntu was supposed to be before they lost their way)
Did Matt try putting the regular build on a newish machine? That’s what I did with my current and was struggling until I put the latest kernel on it, should have gone with Edge, but had little trouble after)