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Long time Gentoo user (almost 10 years) here. I'll admit that it is NOT a distribution for everyone, tailored more towards power users and tinkerers in general, but for me it is the ideal distribution. Here are a few reasons why I think Gentoo is great: * Customizability / minimalism: Binary distributions usually come with tons of packages compiled with all kinds of bells and whistles, and often times make choices for you like what init system to use, what DE/WM to use, heck even what kernel to use. They are customizable to a degree, ie. you can install additional DE's after the fact, but not as much as Gentoo, which puts you in control of exactly what should be installed, and exactly what options to turn on. On a machine without bluetooth? Don't compile any bluetooth support into any libs/apps, not even in the kernel. Gentoo allows you to build a custom-tailored minimal software bundle for your exact hardware. * Bleeding edge: Being a rolling release distribution, you get to experience the latest and greatest of open source software as it is being developed. Admittedly Gentoo has fallen behind lately on some areas due to not having as many active maintainers as it once used to, but for most areas it is still as bleeding edge as you can get (probably behind Arch overall). GNOME 3.8.2 became available the next day after its release, I'd say that is pretty bleeding edge. * Documentation: The Gentoo forums and wiki are a great source of information for any general linux desktop (and server) issues. Arch has taken over in terms of having the majority of the mindshare, but I view both distributions' forums/wikis as the primary source of informed discussion on desktop linux topics. * Speed: Not everyone is into -Oomg-optimized ricing, but for people who are, few other distributions will let you use custom CFLAGS all around and push your hardware truly to the limit. Long live Gentoo! |