I am looking for a distro that is based on Gentoo or is heavily inspired by it. I am a long-time Gentoo user and Debian on system where I don’t have the time to maintain it. I love the flexibility of Gentoo, but although my hardware keeps up, I find my self often not willing to wait hours for an update on my main machine. I am glad that there are some binary packages for some programs and I use flatpak, too. But even though, updates take too long, time I want to spend using my computer. I thought of going to Debian everywhere, because it is stable and does not move too fast regarding major updates. So, Arch-based distros are no option for me.
Can someone of the community recommend any Gentoo-based distros?
Gentoo doesn’t have many descendant distros (unless you count ChromeOS, which is a whole other crottle of greeps), and most of them inherit all of its warts. That flexibility you praise exists pretty much because it’s a source distro—you can’t select which optional features you want if you don’t compile the code yourself.
I usually either run “emerge world” overnight with the --keep-going option or set MAKEOPTS so that I’ll have a core free for interactive use while it’s compiling. These days, portage won’t break your system on you—not like ~2005 when you had to run revdep-rebuild all the time to keep from hosing stuff—so it’s safe to update unattended provided you check the list of packages beforehand using --pretend, and mask or --exclude anything dodgy.
So, the real decision I have to make is: Do I still want/need this flexibility or not?