I used Gentoo for ten years (2005–2015), and I was very happy with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have the same setup on every machine I use.

I've been on Gentoo for my gaming desktop for like 2-3 years now and I don't think I've ever had an update break anything.

I will say though that my valgrind is broken due to march native. :)

I think Gentoo is very stable, but you have to make use of revdep-rebuild and know what you are doing (meaning: it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot).

Hah, same! NixOS is perfect for me; I love the declarative aspect. But Portage is far-and-away the best traditional package manager I've ever used. It's truly phenomenal.

What Gentoo really needs is an official immutability mechanism like ostree used by Fedora Silverblue or ZFS/btrfs snapshots of the root/boot volumes. This way the ever-experimental nature of the distro would be compensated by having an easy mechanism to rollback to previous known-good builds.