Gentoo is more about the fun of building a Linux distro that is perfectly tailored to your hardware and personal preferences. Sometimes you’ll see a performance increase of 0.01%, sometimes 25%+. Just depends on a lot of different things.

The build times are really only a consideration on first or second install of the OS. And even with your first install, you’ll probably want to start with the pre-built options, and then gradually move away from that to compiling more and more of your own system.

There are a couple apps like Firefox that also have pre-compiled binaries available for Gentoo, so no waiting there. Of course, there’s also Flatpak for desktop-based apps.

Otherwise, you just compile what you want, when you want. And you can tell Portage how much in terms of cores/threads/resources it gets to use when compiling, so that it can just run in the background while you’re doing your normal thing (or scheduled for when You’re not using your machine).

Portage is also a phenomenal package manager, and can track and satisfy all dependencies for you as-needed. You can also specify what elements of your system to keep on stable, vs testing, etc. It’s not like Slackware.

Gentoo is what was used to build ChromeOS, along with many other distros. It’s as complex/simple, secure/insecure, private/un-private, latest-and-greatest/LTS as you tell it to be. You can choose to update things continuously in the background, or just once a week overnight, or on any other schedule that you want.

You’ll probably learn some new things in the course of installing it, but follow the handbook to the letter, avail yourself of the community, and be patient to start with. It works for me, and I like it, but there are plenty of excellent pre-cooked distros that are also great. I’m just a tinkerer by nature, and enjoy getting increasingly more out of my machines over time.

If you don’t care about the benefits of Gentoo, such as the excellent use flags system, then no it’s very much not worth it.

If you’d rather that every program comes compiled with every possible option, and requires every possible dependency because of this, then you’d be better suited by a binary distro.

If, however, you’re the kind of person that wonders “why does my torrent client support sound, which pulls in these five audio dependencies? I don’t ever need it to make noise, can’t I just disable the ability for torrents to go ‘bing’ when they’re done and forego installing those dependencies?”, then gentoo might be for you.

Gentoo seems great if you want to experiment with patches to major programs or system libraries. That’s what I used it for.

Gentoo is good for learning. It’s not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you’re tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a “one step up” distribution.

Gentoo also has closed source software available. It just uses the ebuild to configure the install.

Chrome for example.

Gentoo is not sold as a privacy or criminal OS. It is used for customization and optimization that you cannot have in the same way without rebuilding software.

or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?

Privacy and usability are inversely correlated. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has a relatively weak definition of “privacy” or a relatively exotic definition of “usable”. If you’re at the point of installing an OS like Gentoo just for its privacy benefits alone, I’d say you’re already the latter case, even from the perspective of most fellow Linux users.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily imply very un-private software is always very usable, or that highly privacy-respecting tools with good UX don’t exist. Just that most highly UX-polished software tends to have poor privacy, and most privacy-focused software expects the user to do a lot of hoop-jumping to make up for all the systems and workflows the user can’t utilize due to having some dealbreaking non-privacy-respecting component to them.

If you want fastness, consider using void linux instead

Actually, Gentoo has no restrictions against packaging closed-source software, or even for-pay software. The net-im category is full of closed source.

Closed-source games rarely get packaged, and almost never in the main tree, in part because they all have to be fetch-restricted. The system can’t predict whether you bought from Steam or GOG or some smaller store, or whether you have a means of downloading from that store without user interaction, so it has to send you to download the package yourself and place it in the source directory. That’s considered a black mark against the package. (There was someone a few years ago who was packaging GOG games in an overlay, but they don’t seem to be doing it anymore.) In general, no distro will package this stuff—you’re better off installing Steam and having it manage your games.

As for build times, get used to letting updates involving large packages run unattended overnight. Sort out the dependencies, issue an emerge with --keep-going, and go to bed. Works for PI3s and my Athlon64x2 laptop, anyway. (If this is still intolerable for you, maybe Arch would be a better fit?)

Finally, you may not be aware that the most complete list of Gentoo-packaged software available is not on the official site, but at gpo.zugaina.org, which also indexes ebuilds in overlays and Bugzilla.

The package manager portage is simply the most flexible one I have ever used, especially with the new binary repositories; it beats deb and dnf/rpm by far in my opinion.

Ommiting features of installed software with the help of useflags can make it more stable and secure.

I think it is “criminal” not wanting to use Gentoo as a daily driver. But this is just me and my opinion doing only honest stuff with it. (:

afaik, the “main gimmick” of gentoo is to have a distro that is 100% optimized for your PC. That aside, I don’t see a point installing it unless your PC is centuries old and really need the extra speed boost.

If you are looking for a good OS for privacy I would recommend Qubes OS, it completely blows away pretty much everything else besides tails. Gentoo is not exactly the most private of operating systems apart from the usual linux privacy.

Gentoo can be good if you desire some very weird or exotic configurations or just want more granular customisability that binary DIY distros don’t offer. The way it’s built allows that in a way that makes it easier there. If you don’t really need that and aren’t a fan of the build times, it won’t hurt going for something like Void or Arch which are also DIY distros but all-binary so you don’t need to worry. (unless you use xbps-src or the AUR).

No, but it is fun too use 🙃

You have a relatively weak CPU for Gentoo – there is no denying that. The upside of Gentoo is that you can make it exactly how you want it, it will be truly tuned by you for you unlike anything else. I ran it myself for a while. And if you want security, if you have the time to really understand the hardening options Gentoo can be more secure than anything else. As I said, how good Gentoo works and what it can do is a direct function of the user.

Definitely not for my use case which is just having a desktop where I can write documents and surf the net. So I just don’t go for it.

It appears it is not for your usecase either. I would second going for all binary distros like arch or void.