Just wanna preface, I’m not trying to like attack Gentoo or anyone that uses it, I just wanna understand lol
I’m like an intermediate Linux user I’m definitely not an expert, and Gentoo is something I’m still quite confused about. To me it just seems unnecessary, like the real version of people making Arch just seem incredibly complicated. Does anyone actually use it as a daily driver? Why? Is it just for the love of the game? Is there some specific use case I’ve not heard or thought of?
I messed around with it back in college. Had a lab where we had to make our own OS with a purpose. Lots of people made their own digital picture frame. This was back in 2005 when linux and gentoo were rougher around the edges. I tried compiling my own custom kernel. One that had only the drivers needed for my hardware. Took like 2 days per compile. After several tweaks and fixes I got the kernel to compile, but not boot.
Eventually caved and went the easy route of compiling the generic kernel because I had a deadline. I installed xfce, metasploit, nessus, wireshark, and a handful if other tools to make a knockoff kali linux for my project. It was fun, and I learned a lot.