This weekend I will retire my last desktop machine running Gentoo (still have some servers running it). It's been serving my mother for almost ten years with only minor hitches along the way. The machine is an AMD Sempron at 1.8 GHz so updating Gentoo is such a pain that in the last few years I would only update when she was away for a few days. So she would leave it on and I would update the computer remotely which creates its own set of possible problems.
Why didn't I switch to some other distro? Well, I tried, but this is the only machine I have ever used where there is a significant effect of all the Gentoo toiling involved. Ubuntu would take minutes to just display the login screen and starting firefox meant a whole different dimension of time for grabbing a coffee (lunch, rather). After a brief attempt, back to Gentoo it was. So the trade-off up to now is usable everyday speed vs. excruciatingly slow updates.
The new machine will run Ubuntu, though, because my mother wants to be able to update her computer herself these days (parents grow up too fast, sigh). Still, I owe to Gentoo much of what I know about Linux and computers, in particular to only shoot myself in the foot very carefully when the docs warn me that whatever I am doing is a bad idea. Chasing bizarre build failures taught me that not all hard- and software is created equal, no matter what some "standard" says. Sometimes hardware implementation of some feature is plain broken and sometimes I tried to install that singular combination of software that just won't work. Or I forgot to include drivers for, say, mass storage...
It's good to see Gentoo is alive and kicking.