Personally I’ve been using Gentoo for about 2 years now (or a year and a half?). I’d tried all the mainstream distros from Ubuntu (before the move to the Unity desktop and the integrated ads) to Arch over the years and to be fair - there was nothing really wrong with any of them. I’ve also gotten halfway through the LFS book before getting bored back in the day.
Started using Gentoo because my friend said I can compile every package from source with my own optimization flags set. Figured maybe it’ll give me better performance. Not that my system was performing bad in any way, I just like to tinker with things. End result? Probably no real improvement, but I do have fairly low idle memory usage (Using KDE Plasma desktop) and somehow I love that installing packages has more weight to it. It also keeps me from installing packages with a billion dependencies unless I really need them. But mostly I love that it has taught me a LOT about how Linux works underneath - using Linux Mint I never really had to worry about what my init system is. And with Arch I just nuked my install and didn’t bother fixing it - through no fault of Arch itself, of course.
Personally I’ve been using Gentoo for about 2 years now (or a year and a half?). I’d tried all the mainstream distros from Ubuntu (before the move to the Unity desktop and the integrated ads) to Arch over the years and to be fair - there was nothing really wrong with any of them. I’ve also gotten halfway through the LFS book before getting bored back in the day.
Started using Gentoo because my friend said I can compile every package from source with my own optimization flags set. Figured maybe it’ll give me better performance. Not that my system was performing bad in any way, I just like to tinker with things. End result? Probably no real improvement, but I do have fairly low idle memory usage (Using KDE Plasma desktop) and somehow I love that installing packages has more weight to it. It also keeps me from installing packages with a billion dependencies unless I really need them. But mostly I love that it has taught me a LOT about how Linux works underneath - using Linux Mint I never really had to worry about what my init system is. And with Arch I just nuked my install and didn’t bother fixing it - through no fault of Arch itself, of course.