It’s not really a big deal, but I am currently writing this using a linux kernel I compiled from source, which certainly feels like an accomplishment. The Arch Wiki has made the process fairly easy to follow. I just took the stock Arch Linux configuration without changes for now.
The most important part of this is of course that I have the option to do that, to take the source code of this incredible project and build my own kernel binary.
not OP but on my i7 7700K a fully-featured kernel takes about 2 hours or so to compile. if i minimize the kernel to only the modules i need i can get it down to 20-30 minutes (clean). incremental compiles barely hit 5-10 mins
overall not a big deal, especially compared to something like firefox (or god forbid chromium). or gcc with pgo (which is technically cheating because it compiles itself 3 times if you enable pgo)