Gentoo user here.

Of course I always build every package from source because that’s how Gentoo works.

Well, you get well optimized software for your specific cpu and architecture that often will not run on a different CPU. At the cost of lots of time.

For big ones like Firefox or rust I always choose the prebuilt ones… But everything else is from sources.

Also, another great advantage is to customize package features to your likings, like disable an audio backend or enable another, and such.

I think your autocorrect went a bit too far, I cannot understand what you wrote.

Using a different distro feels awkward. I am so used to how stuff is organized in Gentoo :) but it’s still Linux, so no, it’s only minor differences.

(Spcially, i hate when using a SystemD based distro, because i am not used to it and it honestly feels cumbersome compared to OpenRC. Gentoo also has SystemD support, it fully support it, but i never found the need for it, so i never switched, and never got familiar with it. My fault)

Last weekend i setup a laptop from deleting the windows partition to full LXQT desktop in 4 hours. The laptop is quite fast, and i skipped all ocmpiler hogs like firefox (choosed firefox-bin) and rust (choosed rust-bin). Later on, i also installed a full plasma+kde environment in some more 10 hours (all compile time in background, while using the laptop on LXQT).

The biggest downside of Gentoo is being so niche, i always fear that some day it will be abandoned due to too few people maintaining it. I had this fear for the last 10 years, and never happened, so.

There are no real downsides to Gentoo IMHO, except becoming too expert with Linux :)

Really, it’s mostly understand what your are doing and editing text files. Much easier and better documentation than most other distro.

Full time user of Gentoo since 20+ years here. Oll servers, workstations, laptops and even on an android tablet once.

It’s not complicated at all, mostly just different from anything else. And truly configurable to the last bit.

Edit: it seems there aren’t may gentooers here, AMA :)

No, it’s not. The key point is let each tool do its job. Let your reverse proxy do https as it Is intended to do, and will do more securely than your own implementation.

I never trust any random project tls implementation. Just use my nginx reverse proxy https setup that is proven and battle tested.

So yes it make sense and it’s actually a security enhancement, not otherwise.

If you are not willing to setup your own reverse proxy and open your services to the internet, you are the security risk.

Well, now try Gentoo!

It will take a few days of compiling… ;)

Matrix? You can setup an account on a public server without self-hosting it, then access via Linux and android clients.

XMPP as well, but I don’t know if there are public servers

Both cases you can also self host the server. For matrix, avoid synapse and use Continuwuity.

I prefer FluffyChat. Since version 2 is better than before.

Still no matrix client for android as good as any other “proprietary” chats.

For fun, in the 90’s. Windows was cool still, but what Linux was at the time was just fashinating and I just loved it.