> Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.

Based on what I can see after putting a minute or two into searching, that verbiage being referred to only appears on the About page. [0]

The distro's home page says

  Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution. 

And -speaking as a Gentoo user since 2002- neither the user community nor the maintainer community hold the opinion that Ultimate Maxxximum Performance is the distro's goal. Trouble reports that come from "ricers" pretty much always get told "Set your compiler flags to something sane (try '-O2 -pipe' or '-O2 -pipe -march=native') and rebuild. If you can still repro the problem, file a new report because this one is getting closed INVALID.".

And -while the old Gentoo Wiki burned down so I can't prove it- [4] the advice about GCC optimization in the wiki has always cautioned against using aggressive compiler flags and warned that doing so will -among other things- not substantially improve performance. The advice about reasonable compiler flags has pretty consistently been "Use -O2, -pipe, -march=$THE_CORRECT_SETTING_FOR_YOUR_CPU, and maybe -fomit-frame-pointer"... though the "-fomit-frame-pointer" advice has always come with a warning that doing that may make debugging either extremely difficult or impossible, and the "-march" advice the warning that this may make it impossible to run those binaries on another computer.

Anyway. There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim. The distro is and always has been about flexibility, user choice, and having fun. And it's a nice bonus if building for -say- -march=athlon-xp instead of -march=i586 happens to get you a bit of extra performance here and there.

[0] <https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/about/>

[1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20230101024843/https://www.gento...>

[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20150406115846/https://www.gento...>

[3] That year's April 1 redesign was a bit cool, IMO.

[4] The oldest copy that I can easily find is from mid 2013 [5], so you'll just have to trust me that this has been the long-standing opinion of the overwhelming majority of users and maintainers. While you're there, take a minute or two to skim the prose and notice how it consistently warns against using aggressive compiler flags.

[5] <https://web.archive.org/web/20130829083155/https://wiki.gent...>