Everything just feels way more complicated than it needs to be.
I tried installing Openshot (a video editor) but I couldn’t figure out how to fix the error it spits out when I try to emerge it.
I will now try out Arch and hope I don’t need a master’s degree to install packages.
Edit: Gentoo isn’t the first distro I’ve tried, I’ve been daily driving Debian for more than a year and just wanted to try it out since I heard good things about it. And also I didn’t really need to use Openshot, I just wanted some video editor and arbitrarily chose to install that one.
Also I guess I will just stick with Debian since apparently Arch is also complicated.
As an every-day Gentoo user, there is little reason to use Gentoo unless you have specific, niche configuration requirements. For instance, if you need to use a very specific version of a piece of software with very specific build-time parameters.
Where Gentoo shines is the ability to combine some old packages with some bleeding edge ones. If I, for some reason, want to run PostgreSQL 10 (released 2017) alongside Node.js 20 (released 2023), it is a thing I can do. This is not possible on most other distros - at least, not without side-stepping the package manager and compiling a bunch of things yourself.
I’ve used Gentoo several times over the years, and what ultimately made me switch back was Docker’s reliance on iptables. I was using Fedora at the time, which had switched to nftables. (I don’t think this is as much of an issue now, but it was a few years back).