Warning: lots of hyperbole and sarcasm below

It's dead, Jim.  Why do I think so?  Several reasons:

CFLAGS and Ricing

Ricey CFLAGS were neat a couple years ago, since back then there weren't any other popular source-based GNU/Linux distributions.  NO, Slackware is not a source-based distribution (common misconception, though).  Everyone believed that their system would be 100x faster if X, glibc, the kernel, etc. were all compiled with processor-dependent -march flags, -O3, and other things.  Does it really make a difference for web-browsing, email, IRC, AIM, etc?  NO.  Will it make a difference for 3D rendering, video encoding, and MPI applications?  Sure.  But folks who really care about the speed of such applications should compile them separately, anyway.  No need to have Firefox and Qt compiled with the same insane CFLAGS.

What I'm trying to say is the days of "ooh, my laptop pwns your laptop because I compiled cat and perl with -O8" are over.

Deprecation

Gentoo seems to go through portage utilities and arguments like most people go through underwear.  They always seem to change, and once you're used to the operation of one, it's deprecated in favor of another.

Portage

It just sucks.  Actually, it always has, but it's much worse, now.

Portage has never done proper reverse dependency checking.  What happens if I want to remove libmcs, but audacious depends on it?  Portage will let it be removed anyway, w/out any warnings.  How hard is this?  All other package management systems will easily let you know what will break.

It's awfully slow.  Even on very high-end hardware, it can take minutes for equery to finish a given task.  Lately, I've noticed that the compilation process of certain applications takes half as long as portage takes to calculate dependencies.  This, however, was not always the case.  When I first started using Gentoo back in 2003 (I think), portage was on-par with apt and dpkg.  Creeping featurism might be to blame, I suppose (like crazy colors?).

So-called blockers will come up during an emerge world, mostly because (from what I can tell) emerge won't automatically remove conflicting/obsolete packages.  So you have to do this yourself.  Not a big deal, but… why?

There are so many stupid little scripts floating around that appear to work around portage's deficiencies.  Since won't rebuild applications that have runtime dependencies on whatever's being rebuilt (say, libssl), an additional requirement is to use a hacky script called revdep-rebuild.  If that doesn't work, then you're forced to search around for some script that's specific to the library you're rebuilding, like fix_libtool_files.sh and python-updater.

USE flags

They were a great idea, until they got out of hand.  I think the original goal was to enable or disable a couple USE flags (like -gui) in your /etc/make.conf so all applications would be built to your standards.  Now, there are hundreds of USE flags, most of which only pertain to two or three programs.  Why not just show a pretty blue screen like FreeBSD's ports tree does during a make config?

Additionally, things that should be included as USE flags surpriginsly aren't.  For example: projectm support in audacious-plugins.  Sure, it's crashy, that's why it should be left off by default, not REMOVED completely.  How about composite support in gnome-terminal?

Profiles

Who cares about these?  The only time I see them is when my profile has been obsoleted, and I need to update it.

Modularity

It's a sickness, I think.  Gentoo is trying so hard to be modular that it's adding more and more bloat.  I remember when installing XFree86 involved one or two ebuilds.  Now it's a couple dozen ebuilds, and doesn't even include the core included apps like xlogo!

It's not green

If I were an environmentalists, I'd hate Gentoo.  Burning up the power lines with redundant compute cycles dedicated to compiling ordinary applications like xterm ought to be a crime!

No more XMMS

Back in 2006, XMMS was removed from Gentoo's portage.  This annoyed me because at the time, there wasn't an alternative for it.  Audacious was listed as an alternative, but at the time it lacked the stability and speed that XMMS sported.  This led to everyone trying to switch to Audacious, pissing off the lead developer, and causing a huge flamewar on IRC and Bugzilla.  I, for one, would have used XMMS for the next 10 years (I'm old-school that way).  Only now, two years later, can Audacious finally load my whole music library w/out crashing.

Conclusion

I have 2x personal computers and 1x work computer that run Gentoo.  Next time they are reinstalled, they're getting Debian.

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