Gentoo Linux might be the best desktop Linux distro for advanced Linux users

Gentoo is pretty much the easiest distro when you want to do things outside the norm (doesn't have to be much).

Cooking your own food is great if you value your time at $0. I just eat fast food every day to maximize my free time (spent on doomscrolling).

And if you're me, SSHing into that machine from the other side of campus to check on the status of the update :)

Arch is less flexible but AUR wins for me over overlays. I find writing and modifying Arch pkgbuild a lot easier than Gentoo ebuild.

Ebuild offers a lot of functions and "magic" which looks nice in theory but actually means you will be lost if you don't write them often. Arch pkgbuild look like a shell script. Adding a random patch to an existing package is extremely easy.

Gentoo and Linux from Scratch (LFS) were a great way to learn back in the day (yes, 20-some years ago) — and support relatively custom operating environments through USE flags (e.g., which flavor of Motif did I want to use). I found Gentoo to be a rather practical low-level tradeoff in that era compared to Debian (super old package set and release cadence). You have to bear in mind: there were plenty of Gentoo users out there who weren't into abusing CFLAGS and such. And Portage had such a low bar to climb to create a package (cf. Debian Policy Manual as a description of the arcane nature of Debian package management with dh). Moreover, Ubuntu, which was a good pressure on Debian to modernize, wasn't yet on the mainstream for a good window of time when Gentoo really took off.