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>> Compared with Debian or Red Hat, Gentoo is really a meta-distribution. It's a nice basis for creating your own distribution.

> I do not want that on my production server. We're in the $SOME_BACKEND_SERVICE business, not in the distro creating business.

A lot of companies know that Google and Facebook have their own distros. Ergo, to become as successful, they too must build their own distro.

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I know this comment was probably sarcastic, but it's also a good teachable moment: what did those huge companies with heavily customized distros base their distros on before they started customizing? You'll find a lot of RHEL/CentOS/Debian core in those lists, not much Gentoo or similar. The stability (and stability-emphasizing philosophy) of those original base distros will permeate customizations for years to come.

The most notable exception to this would be Chrome OS (which also served as a starting point for CoreOS and, IIRC, Google's container OS).

This hasn't stopped Google from using a Debian variant internally as a desktop OS, so they all kind of have their place depending on what you intend to build.

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