I used to use Gentoo, until I switched to OpenBSD.  Now the way you just bundled &quot;Gentoo and BSD&quot; together sounds as if you think they have something in common.  They really don&#x27;t, and the BSDs are quite different to each other too so you can&#x27;t really treat them as one.<p>As the linked writeup says, Gentoo is very much about choice.  The ability to keep use flags turned off meant I had a leaner system with fewer dependencies, and I never had (pulse)audio problems all the while I had to fix family members&#x27; computers running kubuntus and such every week.  No need to fix and change configurations and whatnot after every update -- set the system up once, and it&#x27;ll mostly work the same way for a long long time.  The other monolithinc distros seemed to break every time a big upgrade rolled.  And since your programs are built against your libraries, you don&#x27;t get the dependency problem of having to update all your packages just because someone bumped a popular library or two.  It&#x27;s all nice, and there&#x27;s nothing to fear re. building from source, as the portage tooling do it all for you automatically.  It just takes time, which can be a problem and one reason why I&#x27;m not running Gentoo now.  Also, the last time I used Gentoo, it required a little more configuration than I think it should.  As in, I think it could use more defaults that you don&#x27;t need to touch unless you want to.<p>I can&#x27;t speak for the other BSDs, but OpenBSD is totally opposite to Gentoo.  You get binary packages and are mostly discouraged from building from source.  There aren&#x27;t that many knobs and optional dependencies.  The devs want to provide good defaults and eliminate the need for twisting knobs and configuring things that can be handled by the OS.  Indeed, they want to remove knobs, so that there are fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot making the system less secure, or to just generally end up in a poorly tested configuration.  You don&#x27;t get to choose between five bootloaders, three init systems, seven filesystems and a few hundred kernel options.  And if you go out of your way to build a very special custom system, you can expect no help from the community when you run into trouble.