>>55227367
It's just a meme. Also I like my sister.

>>55227367
pretty much depends on your needs. Your distro should be fitting your needs and nothing more or less. If you are doing well with w/e you have installed then why listen to /g/ and switch to gentoo?
Asides from that: yes, it is pretty much a meme

>>55227367
It stems from an ancient reddit meme that /g/ co-opted for itself.

>>55227367
Only if you are under 20 and have plenty of time to spare.

>>55227367
I present to you: The creation of gentoo meme
> be me
> 46 yrs old neckbeard virgin
> lets try new distro
> go for gentoo coz its cool name and i have no life
> mfw this sux
> shit what do i do
> got two options:
> install ubuntu like a pleb
> stick to gentoo and pretend its great
> sticking to gentoo
> make a meme about it to feel better bout myself

>>55227367
It's alright. Gentoo has gone an extremely long way. Source based distros will almost never be worth your time because either I/O constraints (unless you have an NVMe drive or something like that) or a CPU constraint.
Optimization flags are typically a waste of time; but if you cherry pick them you can get an all round 30-40% thoroughput improvement without losing stability.
USE Flags are really good for building in extra features or stripping dependencies you don't use, but to use it as a debloat method would be a huge mistake because essential build dependencies are pretty big anyway. An operational minimal Gentoo build with X is roughly 1.2G.
I run Gentoo on my workstation (remote, I access through both nomachine and ssh+X fwding) because I don't update software often, it's sufficiently powerful (2x E5 2670) to compile and see appreciable performance benefit, and it doesn't use SystemD. It's also easier to run multiple kernel sources - I use a hardened source regularly and one only for thoroughput. In addition, it helps to clone your configs from previous machines so you don't need to waste your time configuring the system.