I tried Gentoo some 20 years ago or so for fun at home. I guess my naive thinking was that software specifically compiled for my hardware would run noticeably faster and "better".

But I didn't last for very long. I remember starting the install for a bigger app before going to bed, only to find the thing still building when I woke up. And as for the dream of more tailored builds, I never really noticed anything much different - I probably was too uneducated about build configurations, or - more likely - the differences just didn't matter too much.

Eventually, I switched to Ubuntu and never looked back.

So, I'm curious - is anyone using Gentoo as their daily driver, and what is the main incentive for you?

I'm using it as my main OS. I have it installed on 4 machines: a RK3288 SBC, a RK3588 desktop, a x86-64 desktop and a x86-64 laptop. Main incentive for me is customization.

- It makes it very very easy to patch any package before they're installed - just put the patches in /etc/portage/patches/<pkg name>/, and that includes the kernel too.

- I can exclude package features that I don't like. For example, my Firefox doesn't try/offer to turn on the wifi.

- I can also exclude entire packages that I don't like, because the entire dependency chains can be eliminated by disabling USE flags. For example, none of my systems have systemd or dbus. Since last year I don't even have openrc anymore (the other Gentoo service manager). One of them doesn't even have udev. I tweaked it so much, I'm not even sure I can still call it Gentoo.

Daily Gentoo desktop user since 2007. Compilations/ricing is one thing, the variety and flexibility of the portage and USE flag system is another. For me it just makes sense to stay with this proven distro. I use Ubuntu variants on my work PC and they just have all this crap that I don't have to tolerate on my gentoo installs.

P.S.: I've got to admit, though, that I was always impressed by the really great quality of Gentoo's documentation!

My understanding is that compiler flags yielding speed boosts where an actual thing back in the day, but not anymore really.

Nowadays the speed come from other things. For example a few years ago i realised my firefox on linux was doing video encoding/decoding on cpu without using the intel gpu’s hardware encoder/decoder. I did not have to rebuild firefox from scratch but rather fiddle with configurations and environment variables to make sure Firefox wouldn’t assume the lowest common denominator.

That saved battery on my laptop and yielded better performance.

I used it on an off as my daily machine for around 15-20 years I think. It is fast in terms of execution-on-hardware speed, and genuinely puts you in control. For a certain kind of user this is more important than anything.

These days I'm on OSX mostly because of the frequency of business trips meant I needed something small and portable a few years ago, and now the hardware is so much better than what you can get for the PC world. Plus, I am hyper-conscious of my time and can't really afford to be fiddling with new system libraries, kernel configurations and so forth.

Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall, and after enough iterations I'd started to err to Ubuntu at some point. But it was by far the most fun of any Linux I used, save perhaps Slackware which was my first.

I think in a few years' time the next machine I build will be a non-Apple ARM custom portable, hopefully running Gentoo, with a lot of custom machining and hardware features.

I remember triggering my third recompile of kde-base because I wanted a gui calculator. I moved away not long after that.