Why I prefer Gentoo over Arch.

A lot of people say very good things about gentoo linux, it is very well maintained, It is more secure, It is lightweight and so on. But when it comes down to it, very few people actually use gentoo, I think that is because they install it and after a month or so they really get sick of waiting for the packages to compile and they switch back to whatever they were using before. I know it because, I had done that in the past, I dual-booted my machine with gentoo and arch linux intending to only use gentoo, and arch only when I didn't have the time to wait for the package to compile, but ended up only booting to arch and almost never to gentoo, at that time if you were to ask me the best package manager I would have unhesitatingly said arch's pacman, while I still think that pacman is the best binary package manager for the past few months I have started to really like gentoo and its package manager portage and there are different reasons for that.

Compiling programs makes more sense than downloading binaries.

On unix-like operating systems you generally use open-source software and that software is made to be compiled by the users specific to their machines, but on binary based distros you use programs that are compiled for you by someone else and again to me, personally, compiling just makes more sense.

It gives you more perspective to the program you use.

If you'd downloaded a binary package you would only be able to tell if a program is fast, has enough features and so on, but you wouldn't have known how much time it takes to compile, what the build dependencies are, and even sometimes the programming language that it is written in. I do agree that knowing those abstract details of a package is utterly useless for a typical end-user who is not a programmer but for a programmer those details are very important, since you get to know what build systems are faster what programming language compiles faster, builds better and sometimes you get to learn some stuff that you didn't even know existed. You can build programs from source in other distros as well but gentoo makes it easier and forces you to do that and be honest, If you could install binary package in 10 seconds you wouldn't even bother waiting for it to compile for 20 minutes.

You install less packages.

In order to avoid compilation you tent to install less pieces of software resulting in more stable and more performant system. God forbid you if you are using arch linux and have access to the AUR (I had installed more than 2000 useless packages on my arch system).

It is more secure, lightweight and faster (at least in theory).

I have not noticed any significant difference in terms of performance between gentoo and binary based distros and I kind of think that security on client OSes is overrated, but for some few people these might be important since you literally can skip some useless parts of a program (useless for you of course) resulting in less bloated, therefore faster and more secure programs, but again I don't really find it that important.

No systemd!

I am not against systemd but I prefer to not use it. On gentoo the default init system is openrc and it works with no problem.

Bad parts.

Like everything, it has some negative stuff about it as well, those are

• Compilation can take some time.
• Gentoo is the one of the hardest distro to manage.
  

I am saying both of those with an asterisk, because although I agree that there are some big pieces of software that you basically have to have like a browser, (it took 6h to compile a browser on my machine) but most of the time if software takes too much time to compile that indicates that it is overcomplicated and you shouldn't even be using it.
Gentoo is hard to use but, that also means gentoo forces to know more, making you better at system administration.

So, that is all.