The purpose of running a distribution— any distribution— is to outsource a bunch of basic work that all systems need. After all, I could do all that stuff myself just from source, but I'd like to get something _else_ done with my life too.<p>The problem with Gentoo is that it just doesn't have an active enough development community to keep up with that task in the way that Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, or even arch can... so you're stuck doing a lot of stuff yourself, or using old software that you wouldn't be otherwise. Important bug fixes get left marked unstable forever, etc.<p>I think this is really unfortunate because Gentoo does better capture the inherent advantages in running an open source operating system.<p>As an upstream developer, I've found that Gentoo users seem to pretty much the only GNU/Linux users who send _patches_ with their bug reports— even more so than the _packagers_ of other distributions. It's especially remarkable when you consider how many more users these other systems have. I don't believe that it's just because Gentoo attracts the geekiest of the geeky, it's because the distribution inherently gives all the users the tools to contribute back and makes them take some of the startup costs, empowering them to contribute.<p>I wish all distributions were more like gentoo. Innovations in other areas are also important, but there is something to be said about recognizing what makes your system uniquely good and maximizing it— rather than imitating the competitions' strengths... in contrast to what I see with the major distros copying MSFT's and Apple's Signed-everything secureboot stuff, and their bondage and discipline tablet oriented UIs.