A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004. He spent all of his time tweaking compiler flags like -O3 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops and running into so many issues in the process. I think he only lasted about 9 months on Gentoo. To this day, he's the only person I've ever met that was there for performance.

I'm still on Gentoo 22 years later.

> A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004.

Good timing! If memory serves, you missed the Big Libpng Upgrade that either got the concept of Package Slots into Portage or convinced everyone that they were a _really_ good feature to have and use where appropriate.