[barnacs]

not parent but I have some experience with both:

Gentoo was the first distro I ever tried, then I switched to arch and I've been using it ever since.

I found gentoo to be way more of a hands-on distro. I configured the kernel by hand, checked the USE flags of all packages, looked up what each option was for and recompiled a shitload of things when I made a mistake. All these options are right there in your face and it's really tempting to mess around with them. Eventually, I found that it just took up too much of my time to do so.

Arch is still a rather flexible system but it hides some of this low level stuff from the user. I just accept the default kernel, I live with whatever dependencies the package manager tells me are needed and the system doesn't tempt me to do otherwise. However, most of the time I still get to choose what and how I want.

Lately though, sometimes I feel Arch crosses the line: eg. systemd pretty much being forced on users, removing the makepkg option to build packages as root.

[dgeex]

Even if I'm not against systemd (it has its downsides, but it's not that bad as everybody thinks), I still think the user should be given a choice. So yeah, they probably crossed the line in this case.