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smitty1e

> For quite a while, Gentoo was one of the “cool” distributions.

Indeed, eating the learning curve and looking the toolchain in the eye is important.

Also important:

- not spending excessive time watching gcc output scroll by

- not falling prey to USE exuberance and having the system 'splode

Hence: Arch.

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USE exuberance is not bad - if you do it at the package level. I did it aggressively for many years without problems. I stopped only because it became time consuming.

Before moving on to NixOS, I used to manage every USE flag on the entire system. Every single package install or upgrade would prompt a quick look into any USE flag changes and potential reconfiguration. It was really nice knowing your system with that sort of intimacy and _really_ lowered the amount of effort required to make changes to the system. But... nothing can compete with declarative and reproducible at the whole system level.

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