I’ve installed gentoo but there seems like there’s so many sacrifices. I love that it’s all open source, but I really don’t mind closed source software now and then, because after all I would be using it to play closed source games. The biggest compromise I’ve observed is the very long build times. I have a lukewarm cpu(i3 10100) and it’s powerful enough for good gaming but the build times are still like 10x minimum for some software. All this to say, is using gentoo really worth it? I love the idea behind it, and if I was doing criminal activity I’d definitely use it, but is there some absolute upside to it or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?

  • If you don’t care about the benefits of Gentoo, such as the excellent use flags system, then no it’s very much not worth it.

    If you’d rather that every program comes compiled with every possible option, and requires every possible dependency because of this, then you’d be better suited by a binary distro.

    If, however, you’re the kind of person that wonders “why does my torrent client support sound, which pulls in these five audio dependencies? I don’t ever need it to make noise, can’t I just disable the ability for torrents to go ‘bing’ when they’re done and forego installing those dependencies?”, then gentoo might be for you.