Comment by rcxdude
3 years ago
>From what I understand, there are more now that support that level of customizability, such as Arch.
Kind of (having previously used gentoo but now using arch). Gentoo has the philosophy of 'here, you can build this package exactly how you like, and then configure it'. Arch is more like 'here's the package built as close to how the developers intended, and here's how to configure it'. You can build stuff yourself on arch but it doesn't encourage it, and a lot of decisions are made explicitly because they makes maintainers lives easier, not provides features to users.
The feature I really like about Gentoo is I can entirely “turn off X” and never have to worry about any GUI stuff being pulled in or compiled on my servers.
Honestly it's the sleekest OS I've ever worked with, it has exactly what I want and nothing I don't. Sure if I forget to upgrade for a while it's a headache sometimes but I've learned such an insane amount about Linux it's a clearly winning tradeoff. That's on top of being absurdly lightweight, fast booting, and super customizable.