[kelnos]

I cut my teeth on Red Hat (before Fedora was a thing), used Gentoo for a few years when I cutely believed that waiting hours for compiles to finish was fun and useful, but for the last 8-10 years I've been on Debian.

It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. For my laptop I usually run testing, and then stick with stable for 6 months or so after it's released, before switching back to testing. For me, it's a good balance between stability and having recent versions of applications.

[_8j50]

I use both gentoo and debian. I find it hard for either one to replace the other. I can't let go of the control gentoo gives me and as you noted the smooth and stable binary based debian let's you get the job done fast with little hustle. I try to mix and match, using gentoo as a minimalist and debian as a full blown desktop or prod network(http,etc...) server.

[hiq]

In which cases do you need the minimalism Gentoo provides?

[kakwa_]

I've seen companies using Gentoo (with a lot of tooling around it) in specialized context.

Particularly in military contracts, Gentoo brings you several things:

1) you have a full audit trace from the compilation, and in paranoid situation, it's a huge plus.

2) it permits you to minimize the OS footprint quite a lot (feature flags), which helps improving security (less exposure).

3) it permits an high degree of customization, including the combination of software versions used.

4) it's relatively easy to import a patch and maintain an overlay yourself.

We have to keep in mind the constrains of Military contracts: The systems tends to be quite complex, validation is quite lengthy, updates are far in between, they tend to use specialized/weird/not powerful hardware which might need some tweaking, and the level of traceability is generally quite high.

[_8j50]

Hypervisor,router/AP/Firewall.