I use Debian exclusively for my servers. Rock solid experience for me. On my desktops I like having up to date stuff and even though Debian Sid exists it’s not the same as Arch or Gentoo testing.

Gentoo is pretty rad but be prepared for the compile times and to fail a few times (it’s a learning experience!). You could even speed things up by setting up Distcc on a beefy rig to build stuff for your optiplexes.

I was around 16 or 17 when my Windows Vista laptop took a dump. Managed to install Ubuntu via WUBI, not because I was interested in Linux, I just really wanted to watch Gundam on Youtube and I didn’t have the money to take my laptop to a repair shop. When I got a new laptop I planned on staying with Windows 7 but 3 days later I nuked and paved Linux Mint over it because I got used to how Linux worked lol. 13 years later I’m running Gentoo on my main desktop, Arch on my laptop, and debian everywhere else.

Also one of the use cases for flatpaks I forgot to mention was for proprietary software like Steam, Spotify, and Discord. It makes installing those a breeze.

The point of Gentoo is it’s configurability. Gentoo has binary packages in it’s main repo’s and even an experimental binhost for precompiled packages. Forcing one to use any one thing is against the Gentoo philosophy.

I use Gentoo so when I want to try a package that has a butt ton of dependencies or other fun things I give it a whirl via flatpak if available. It’s super nice, not gonna lie, and I see the use case of immutable distros. I think they are neat.

“I remember Gnome 2 and it was beautiful.”

Women fear me, men fear me, I am the demon lord of the round table