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.