I'm a Gentoo dev and work at CERN since a while. Of course I jokingly suggested that to my colleagues. I think it could actually work pretty well, though. Many physicists use Gentoo.

We run most things on Alma Linux, but there's also RedHat in the mix.

A good intersection of CERN and Gentoo is EESSI. They use CVMFS, which is a FUSE filesystem used for software distribution from CERN, and Gentoo as part of their software stack. See links below for more info:

- https://www.eessi.io/docs/filesystem_layer/

- https://www.eessi.io/docs/compatibility_layer/

Not a Gentoo dev, but also at CERN. I've been using (headless, I'm not going down the GUI toolkit building rabbit-hole again) Gentoo for the last 15 years of development (both at home and at work). Great OS :)

Yeah, I'm really not sure that's a joke; binary packages, optionally combined with a prefix install, seem like a great fit.