3 weeks into Gentoo.
I have tried Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and they have all broken on me. Gentoo has broken on me years ago due to my own fault, but I am way more cautious and knowledgeable now. I have run my eclean, dispatch-conf, needrestart, qcheck, rkhunter etc. and everything checks out. So far I have updated my kernel 5 times now with no issues.
I think grub is the most important thing to make absolutely sure you have correct when you first install Gentoo. It can be confusing and I have messed it up a couple of times years ago. This time around I didn't make any major grub mistake.
My biggest headache happened 1 week after installing. I had everything squeaky clean, but needrestart kept saying my microcode was out of date after rebooting. I tried about 5 different things. What worked for me was updating my motherboard firmware. Downside of doing that was that it wiped my grub config. For some reason when I went into chroot in to remount and reconfigure grub, it said I didn't have permission. So I decided to reinstall from nothing again. After reinstalling with updated motherboard firmware, my cpu microcode was up to date.
My eselect profile is default/linux/amd64/23.0/desktop/gnome (stable.) and my major packages include; gnome-light, firefox, libreoffice, gimp, steam, nvidia-drivers. I haven't had any issue or errors with these packages.
I had an issue with setting up ufw, but after tinkering around for a while I eventually figured out which linux kernel .config options to enable, (it said which ones in the message after emerging ufw LOL.)
Bluetooth is giving me some headaches right now.
I am very happy with Gentoo. On my system it takes about 2 minutes to compile the kernel, less than a minute to rebuild modules. I don't remember how long it took for firefox to compile. I think it couldn't have been much longer than 10 minutes. I could go out and buy 32 more gigs of ram, but honestly I don't feel the need to buy more ram to speed up compile times.
