I wonder what the number of users is various distros. I used Gentoo on my desktop around 15-20 years ago and really loved it, but now I prefer vanilla Debian. I think Arch took over a large part of the Gentoo user base.

Ironically I rather like the fact that OoenBSD's culture is a bit anti-user.

In my older age I'm discovering that being regarded with derision is another type of respect. Linux, like Windows before it, caters to its users. The BSD's respect you enough to assume you're smart enough to cater to it.

It helps that kernel code base is orders of magnitude smaller than the Linux kernel.

Yeah they just wanna normalize their awful, idiotic views. Fucking asshats.

Charismatic (nazi)

Gentoo is one of those distros that actually gets people to learn about their compuers, and as someoneelse has said the wiki is great. tmk a few innovations from the Gentoo "ecosystem" like features of init systems make it into other distros, similar to Arch.

For one, it is largely responsible for supporting and maintaining OpenRC on Linux, and is often the go-to-distro that other distros piggyback off its OpenRC configs and scripts.

Being probably the biggest source-based distribution, it provides invaluable work on developing a system which can be compiled from source that other distro maintainers can look to for guidance.

Portage is also one of the best package managers I have used. It takes into account packages that need to be rebuilt when build dependencies also update. On Arch Linux, I sometimes have to manually reinstall a package like qt6ct when KDE dependencies update. Portage takes care of this automatically when doing a deep update.

In a time when many dystopian laws and surveillance tools like age verification and facial recognition are being enforced, we do not have many distros left that could provide security and privacy measures to bypass these issues by supporting alternative tools. Tools like systemd, which has merged the pull request to include a birth date field in preparation for age verification, tend to develop a monopoly on most distros because of the limited capacity and free time developers have to support alternatives while trying to keep up with other projects. I'm not trying to bash systemd, though, but the fact it is the most dominant init system on most major distros creates a problem for users, especially activists and journalists, who need to protect their identity in this increasingly threatening and dangerous capitalist hellscape.

Gentoo supports many, many packages. It provides the ability to create a system using various combination of tools coming from the GNU, BSD, systemd, and other families. While other distros like Arch may also provide some alternatives, not many distros come close to scale that Gentoo offers. If Gentoo cannot survive, it would be a massive blow to FOSS and our technological sovereignty overall.

Gentoo is probably the most customizable of the Linux distros, as you can compile from source, adjust C compiler flags to optimize application speed, remove compiler level features if you don't want/need them, and they support a LOT of computer architectures. Not to mention the Gentoo Wiki is a gem of documentation that surpasses (imho) even the Arch Wiki.

It's potentially the best Linux distro for tinkerers up there with Arch Linux and NixOS.

From a health-of-the-Linux-ecosystem point of view, Gentoo developers seem more prone than those working for other distros to actually pay attention to things like broken build systems or test suites, and file bugs against them. This is especially the case for exotic arches that the developers of some software claim to support but don't themselves build for (but it affects amd64 too).

these decades you mean

Zero public drama I guess...

A bit of drama means it's humans and not AI bots :)