[kombine]

Never used Gentoo, but what is its advantages over, say, Guix? I don't actually use guix or nix as a daily driver, although one year ago I did install Guix on a separate partition of my desktop PC and I use nix via Home manager to install various cli-based tools.

[wasting_time]

The main selling point is that you compile out any features you are not using, on a global level. Want to remove PulseAudio? Add -pulseaudio to the USE flags and rebuild. Prefer GnuTLS over OpenSSL? Declare it in make.conf and packages that support either will only use your choice.

That's unique to the Gentoo model and gives a fine-tuned system with virtually zero bloat. Other distros inevitably pull in dependencies you don't need because they are linked at build-time in case someone relies on it; choices like crypto backend are made for you by the packager.

Guix lets you tweak things on a per-package level, but currently offers no global feature flags. You can do wild stuff like replace OpenSSL with LibreSSL everywhere, but only as long as they are API- or ABI-compatible.

[techcode]

And at the same time, at least for last few years - you can also get the same (same but different) experience/convenience of having binaries available.

The Gentoo profiles mentioned in another comment is what still allows the system to have packages compiled with a consistent subset of things.

[notme43]

They solve some of the same problems. I wanted to say the project is not focused on being stateful or reproducible, and it isn't, but honestly all the tools are there if you want to craft your install like that. Portage is reminiscent of BSD ports, and features like USE flags are where it really shines. It's designed to be super flexible. Roll your own distro basically.