Back in early 2000s I ran Gentoo as daily driver for a year, while almost a Linux noob, but eager to learn. Installation instructions were long, but excellent.
It was fun, and worked well, but in the end the long compilation times got the better of me. Now I heard they are including binary packages, so the itch is coming back.
Right now running opensuse tumbleweed, which works fine, sometimes too smoothly.
Running Tumbleweed as daily driver. Which Debian do you use for your laptop? Never tried it, but the itch is there…