Not really if you follow a good how-to and have some idea about your hardware. Anyways always leave the old kernel in stock so if your new kernel has some problems you can always boot back using the older one.
If you miss out something important then you may have some problem like once i created reiserfs as a module when I has the filesystem as reiserfs, so I couldn't boot using that kernel, had to recompile it. It may take a few tries to understand but nonetheless kernel compilation is a very easy process if you know your hardware, as I said before too.
My strategy is keep whatever you are sure you need, remove whatever you surely don't have and if you are really unsure keep it. And yeah use
instead of
it will give you a GUI environment to configure your settings and it will display some info on the current item.
I have compiled about 10-15 kernels by now and everytime I do learn something new. It's really fun to compile a kernel and totally harmless. Just that you need time and little understanding nothing else. If you don't really understand anything, just use the defualt configuration, find a how-to, follow what it says and you are done.
Do not try it on a production system if you don't know your way around.
Not a problem if you do it on your home PC. It's a really good way to learn.
