The main benefit to using Gentoo is having complete control over your system. I've been a Gentoo user for nearly 6 years so the feeling of accomplishment has worn off long ago and now I feel like I'm using any distro which is a good thing. use flags come in handy when you want to install a desktop but none of the extra crap that's bundled with it or an application that has a feature that's disabled by default that you want to enable. Most packages take less than a minute to compile and on the stable branch, most of the big stuff only needs to update once in a while. From an outsider it sounds tryhardy to use Gentoo but in reality I'm using Firefox or playing a game while something compiles in the background which isn't as often as you think. I update once a week and it's usually 4 packages that take a minute to compile.

As someone who has daily driven gentoo in the past, I didn't see much benefit to compiling everything over my previous arch install. It was a mess to keep up long term and wasted a lot of power unnecessarily. I'm way more happy on fedora now.

One of the many values of GNU/Linux, and free software in general, is choice. You don't have to use any particular distro if it doesn't fit your use case or preferences. I don't use Gentoo but really appreciate that it exists. If I ever wanted more control over my system, I could turn to this tried and tested distro. I am quite lazy these days and from a short period of breaking Arch, I started breaking Debian, then staying with Debian stable without breaking it and now I have moved to MX Linux, which is Debian that someone else (the MX/Antix team) have set up in the way that I want without having to install everything myself. But, yes. There is great value in Gentoo (like in Kali, Tails, Slackware, Guix, etc).

Yeah, the average user: 1) doesn't care what's running under the hood, and 2) doesn't want to control what's running under the hood.

I'm definitely not an "average user." I like specifying that I don't want wifi, bluetooth, or dvd functionality on my desktop when I have no need/desire to use them. So use flags are one of the main reasons I use Gentoo. Occasionally, it causes some mild irritation, but it's a net-positive for me.

You use Gentoo if you want control and transparency. It's great it if you are the kind of Linux user who wants things in a certain way and wants them to stay that way.

Do you want to use systemd or something else? Do you want to use pulseaudio, some other sound daemon or no sound daemon at all? X11 or Wayland? Emacs built with gtk, some other toolkit or no toolkit at all? Do you care if firefox is built with telemetry support?

If you have no opinion about this sort of stuff or your choices align well enough with a binary distribution then you are probably just as good using something else.

Not a fan of how the OP's written but whatever.

Like any distro, it's for who it's for and if you don't like it then feel free to distro hop until you find one you do. Why is the "average user" trying to use a "hard distro" anyway? Seems like the "average user" is increasingly "some rando who just wants to use their computer" so yeah, I'd say it's pretty useless for someone who has no use for it. I suppose it's more of an "if you don't know why you want it then it's probably not going to help you" sort of thing. I like that it lets me set things up my way then mostly just goes away until I want it for something. Other people like software that holds their hand or handles a bunch of things for them. It's fine, not everything must be for everyone.

If you have lots of free time...? Nah, not really.

t. tried Gentoo once, noticed it took over 7 hours to compile a kernel (on a "HIGH-END gaming rig") -- noped the eff out of it instantly.

I daily drove Gentoo (Funtoo actually) for a couple of years, there are things to love and things to hate in it. For me it wasn't worth it, like you mentioned the compilation times ruined any semblance of optimisation I might had, also having to recompile the kernel because I forgot to enable joystick support was not a great experience. That being said, after the initial difficulty, Gentoo is a breeze to maintain, you have files with the packages you want, which use flags for each, etc so after it's setup once it's just normal upgrades. Also it allows for packages to be installed in one-shot mode, which means you're installing it but are not sure if you'll keep it, then you can run a command to list (and uninstall) all of them. That is one of the features I miss the most on Arch, since it allowed me to keep my system lean.

Well, all customizability arguments aside, there have been more than a few times I've looked at issues people on other distros are having, blinked, and thought, "Your package manager didn't take care of that for you?" Portage may not be the fastest gun in the west, but it's very good at what it does.

Real benefit. For average users it's debatable but if you want to exclude certain components or have complex dependencies "just work" without tons of docker images or need bleeding edge performance by tweaking everything, I don't see any other choice.

Also if you need to seamlessly integrate new projects that don't provide packages, writing a live ebuild is straight forward and will keep updated from a regular git repo just like any other package.

Want to compile certain stuff with clang and the rest with gcc? Or use libressl instead of openssl? Stuff like that? No problem. Just be aware that you might need to file bug reports if you do exotic stuff because gentoo won't prevent you from doing stuff nobody did before.

And installing gentoo by going through the install manual step-by-step, is certainly priceless for diving into linux under the hood. It's a bit like a LFS but without the hassle.

Personally Guix/nix seems better, maybe upload your optimisations with checks and flags to let others recompile where it's most worth it.

Annoy is completely the wrong term. You're getting to control over what is to be built and what's not, and since softwares are compiled and optimised according to my hardware, they are lighter and faster with less attack surface.

That may sound cumbersome for a novice to setup the portage configuration but in return it is really worth the time, and it is usually one time, unless you plan to add or remove features. But once you're satisfied with your configuration, you don't have to look back at it.

I found YouTubers complaining about going through hour long upgrade on the daily bases very misleading. Only a few core packages can take that long, which are upgraded on a quarterly bases.

Wait did you seriously called it a hype? Before switching to Gentoo, I was using Arch, softwares have better support of eachother and if feature isn't working you can always talk with the dev how to resolve it. They might even look into modifying the ebuilds to make them compatible.

FYI, I never came across any breakage and I've been using Gentoo for about an year now.