Worse aspects of Slackware and Arch, without any real benefit that isn't found or done better elsewhere. Besides being a bitch and a half to get installed (worse than Arch or Slackware, which is saying something), the compile times for software are (Or were the 2 times I tried it years back) were absolutely insane.

I get why it's "neat" to build from source, but in my daily driver, I have no desire to waste an entire afternoon/evening doing updates. With Slackware, you KNOW your building a frozen machine, and you plan around it. Arch goes the opposite way, and you know your getting a rolling bleeding release, but you also have very quick and snappy updating as well as surprisingly good stability.

I get why Gentoo exists, but I see it as a hobbyist distro as opposed to something you'd want to get real work done, or a rig for coming home and relaxing with 15 tabs open and a steam game playing.

P.S.: if you head over to protondb, and look up used distros when people reviews, more often than not the Gentoo users cannot play even very simple games where a *Buntu, Arch, or Fedora distro can

I've been using Gentoo for about a year now. I used Void Linux before that and Void is also pretty darn good.

My suspicion to why there's "so little love" for it, is that Gentoo seem a little off-putting with a multi page manual just for installing it; dozens of manual steps and configuration. And for those that get through that, some probably fail to understand some of the various Gentoo concepts and so by next system update, they end up with a broken system. Either way, the Gentoo wiki and handbook is pretty good, so once you use Gentoo you aren't in total darkness.

I guess that the average user would want a Linux based system that just works™ and that's where the likes of Linux Mint, Ubrowntu and friends come in. Actually, on my work laptop I use Linux Mint because I had no time to go through a Gentoo installation on it, so there's that too.

Gentoo has a feature that I very much appreciate, the "Use" flags so that anything I install is customized to what I need. For example qemu with risc-v support. I have a few applications configured specially like that, such that in other distributions I would need a separately crafted package for that, or at least compiled and separately installed to /usr/local. Then keeping said application updated...yeah nah.

Update times on Gentoo doesn't bother me too much, once a week I run through it and my 3900X CPU compiles software fairly fast with its 24 vcores.

Because Larry the Cow is trans.

They fumbled community development. I can't recall, but I used it heavily for a decade. It just became too cumbersome.

Due to pressure from gentoo and others fedora cleaned up their act and made their stock experience way better.

Ultimately, the necessity of deep selection and compile time aren't useful anymore.

Some people just want to load an operating system and do stuff other than compiling everything. I can understand this type of system for someone like a security researcher or developer, but for the average user... a big NO.

Because gentoo doesnt provide anything over the arch i already run...