>>7839220It's only half a meme. The intent is to have a system optimized for your exact use case to get the best performance from your machine (the gentoo penguin is the fastest swimming penguin), since you can set stuff like architecture flags for your specific hardware and USE flags for what features you want. In order to use these flags you need to compile packages with them, which is why you don't use binaries like other distros, obviously compiling is a lot slower. I personally like Gentoo cause of the freedom it offers, if you want to build a full system without any DE, you can. I've also learned a bunch and I've gotten a lot better at troubleshooting and fixing issues in Linux overall. Lastly, it's rolling release but you can keep the system on the stable branch for a "Stable rolling-release" distro, cause I'm lazy and don't like installing new versions of my OS. Essentially, this and the following pic related
