I sometimes half-joke that Gentoo is the only Linux distro I can "tolerate" using. Mostly as I've always been the affectionate butt of jokes from other Linux using friends

After using Gentoo for about 15 years at this point every time I try to use another distro it just feels deeply unintuitive and backward.

Some of the examples I often cite:

If I want a package in Gentoo, I just run "emerge -av [package]" if need be I can alter its USE flags under /etc/portage/package.use/[package-name] and get exactly the features I want and need, and nothing else.

If that package doesn't exist, Gentoo's portage has a system where it suggests "similar" sounding packages. Like if you try to emerge "firebox" instead of "firefox" it will offer it as a correction

If I want a package in Debian/Ubuntu conversely, I type "apt-get -y install [package]" and sometimes find that oops that's not the package I want, or that package doesn't exist under that name!

Then I try searching for that package via aptitude, getting a litany of "libpackage3/5/7/9" or libpackage-something-something-dev libpackage-something-something-doc libpackage-something-something-headers and so on. It's all just very messy. There's also rarely any description as to what the package is without googling it beforehand

For many years I used Chromebooks as my portable Linux PC of choice. My rationale at the time being that Google mandated no "binary blobs" in the kernel and that all hardware support must eventually land in the upstream kernel. Along with hiring the entire Coreboot team these made extremely attractive (albeit cheap and disposable) laptops

Some of the hardware support (keyboard backlighting, trackpad etc) weren't yet in the mainline kernel. On a binary distro I would have to source out (or build my own) patched kernel manually to add this hardware support

Gentoo due to being source based provides an entire mechanism for just this, under /etc/portage/patches

This feature isn't exclusive to the kernel either. Any package you want on a Gentoo system can include any number of custom patches you desire as a user. I've used this feature additionally for enabling things like Intel ARC GPU hardware encoding support under ffmpeg while it was still in development

Gentoo's biggest draw for me however is its philosophy and dedication to "choice". Not choice in the traditional sense of "we have lots of desktop environments to pick from". Choice is etched into Gentoo's very bones by its nature as a source based distribution.

When briefly setting up a temporary NAS at a friends house I opted to simply use Fedora, thinking it would be easier than spinning up a full install of Gentoo for such a short-lived purpose

Installing Fedora and Samba I grabbed my smb.conf from home and used it as a template to set up the NAS. After starting it up I found no success in writing to the drives. I had correctly configured them in /etc/fstab, added the appropriate users and on a whim even tried chmodding the mount point just to rule that out

After a lot of googling it seemed that Fedora's SELinux was the culprit. I'm not interested in debating the merits of its inclusion or not, indeed I agree SELinux is a powerful security toolkit.

I bring it up purely to highlight Gentoo's difference in ethos and why I'm personally drawn to it. Gentoo never "does" anything for you on its own. It does not try to make any assumptions or guess your intentions as a user. I liken Gentoo to being given a bucket of Lego bricks. You have a vision in your head for what you want your system to do, and how to do it. So you build it to those specifications brick by brick.