I am now more-seriously considering trying to daily drive gentoo on one of my 
machines because I hear binaries are becoming more available in their repos. 
The main benefit I see is better control over software versioning. I have been 
using arch and sometimes debian for a few years, but it has a few issues I 
think gentoo could solve. At the same time, I don't hear people talking about 
them.

1. Less difficulty maintaining older or LTS subsets of packages for stability. 
One time a perl upgrade (i think 4 to 5) broke something on my arch system, but 
performing a perl downgrade would have required downgrading a bunch of things 
that depend upon it. Downgrading each of those would require individual manual 
intervention.

2. Still having new features available if I want. Installing recent software 
can be painful on debian, and everything in the repos is ancient.

3. Less difficulty installing packages system-wide with alternative package 
managers like pip, cargo, or flatpak. On arch you better not do a `sudo pip 
install`.

4. Better availability of non-standard feature sets like debugging symbols. 
Debugging on arch is annoying.

5. Better implementation of alternative init systems. I tried Artix and I found 
that they often did not have runit (?) scripts for many packages.

On the other hand, I worry a little bit on how easy it would be to install rare 
software which may be only distributed as `.deb`, `.rpm`, or proprietary binary 
files. The AUR is really convenient.


Are these valid arguments? Or am I ignorant on any of these perceived 
advantages? At the end of the day, I think the most important factor in 
choosing a distro is which package manager it uses. And portage is pretty 
awesome.
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