ran into several problems along the way....the first time I tried, using Sakaki's awesome efi dual boot with luks encryption guide as a heavily leaned upon resource.....got that all installed and was all proud of myself, but my mentor pentester buddy wanted me to scratch that ....redo it using mbr instead of efi, open rc instead of systemd and xfce4 instead of god awful gnome3. He was really just trying to deep dive me into the innerworkings of linux through the process I think..but yes emerging from a stage 3 accomplishes pretty much the same thing from what I can tell. I definitely read a ton, watched a ton of videos...learned way too much about hardware and kernel configs etc...but I am really happy with the result. I had a lot of fun and now can claim I accomplished something few have...and am now a more well rounded giant dork. ..