Why I Use Gentoo

22 June 2026

I am a (relatively) long-time Linux user. I started off with Arch Linux in 2021 before hopping between a variety of distros - Fedora, Artix, Debian, etc.

While I've never truly found a "perfect" distro, Gentoo really felt like it was made for me. At the time of writing this, about a little over a month has passed since I first installed Gentoo and I have no plans to switch any time soon. It definitely has flaws and managing my system is time-consuming but I genuinely enjoy the process.

What is Gentoo?

The snarky answer to that question is that it's a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. However, I think I do have a real answer. Linux is a power-user's OS, Gentoo is a power-user's Linux distro. It has more customizability than any distro I can think of off the top of my head, disregarding obvious cop-out answers such as LFS.

Gentoo is designed around the idea that you can do whatever the hell you want with your OS. Rather than writing tooling to do everything for you, its software is designed to be as flexible as possible in order to support whatever configuration you desire. Want every program to be compiled without wayland support? Go right ahead! Globally disable wayland USE flags.

There are obvious cons to using it, but its cons aren't necessarily flaws. The bad parts of Gentoo are simply due to its design philosophy. It's complex, sure, but that's because it gives you ultimate control. You're encouraged to compile all your software but only because they want you to pick and choose how you build your software. I can go on.

There is a bit of a myth that compiling all your software from source means better performance. This is a hard claim to make because it genuinely just varies wildly. For example, you can use bad C flags which will obviously result in unoptimised software. On the contrary, you can excessively optimize the programs you compile and disable parts of it you don't need which will likely result in a lower memory footprint. Performance improvements are more likely to be noticeable on newer CPUs - although it's still basically non-existent - as most distributed binaries are built for compatibility first and performance second.

If all you care about is performance, Gentoo probably isn't for you. It's a tinkerer's distro among tinkerer distros. Arch Linux and Void Linux are the most minimal modern distros that I've tried and either are a good option if you want low memory usage.

Why I Actually Use It

WIP