Comment by StopDisinfo910

I also liked the idea when I used Gentoo 15 years ago but you quickly realise it doesn't make much sense.

You are trading off having a system able to handle everything you will throw at it, and having the same binaries as everyone else for, well, basically nothing. You have a supposedly smaller exploitable surface but you have to trust that the Gentoo patches cutting these things out don't introduce new vulnerabilities and don't inadvertently shut off hardening features. You have slightly smaller packages but I'm hard pressed to think of a scenario where it would matter in 2026.

To me, the worst debuggability and the inability to properly communicate with the source project make it a bad idea. I find Arch's pledge to only ship strictly vanilla software much more sensible.