Comment by asnyder

Wow, can relate so much to this. I myself am about 18 years in my Gentoo journey. Can relate all to well to the eventual impossibility of an upgrade, especially after years of inattention and auto-pilot. Sometimes its suggestions of updating portage now is the worst thing you can actually do :). Was essentially locked out of a dev system for two years and couldn't be bothered with rescue until some years to salvage the system and migrate to a new server, albeit latest and greatest Gentoo. This has happened a couple other times over the years, whose details are similar but different in their own ways.

Recently tried Funtoo for a while on AWS, but never felt right, as I could never get used to ego sync. Happy AWS now has community Gentoo packages.

Use other distros all the time, Amazon's Linux, Ubuntu/Debian, etc. as I've become too lazy to configure most things when they're running in isolation, such as Dockers or SNAPs. Don't need to be opinionated, just enjoy that bloat and forget it.

However, there's something very satisfying to Gentoo. The USE, and similar flags. Being able to set just what you need, nice slots, easy upgrades (usually, especially if you remember to add your USE to the respective package files vs inline). Can get everything as I like, where I need, and can really use a server fully. Don't think I'll ever give up my personal Gentoos on Linode, despite having various clouds and distros elsewhere. Something about it just feels like home.