Arch mostly just works. The big issue I run into is that the upgrades are _almost_ flawless, which bites you once a year or so when you least expect it.

However now I think about Gentoo as a more-adult one. It's really a meta-distribution. It was and is misunderstood by a lot of people. Teenage me included. Gentoo is deceivingly easy to setup - documentation is excellent and tooling mature.

I think that the best way to use Gentoo is to really set all the USE flags and all the unmasking to one's will, but not for a single computer. There should be a binhost - a binary package server available for whole fleet of computers. You can also cross compile for a totally different architecture. Then the customization comes in handy.

Also now it's certainly easier than when I've done it. I used Gentoo on a desktop with a whooping 512MB RAM. Now compile times are significantly lower.

To sum it up: use Gentoo to build a custom Linux distribution for fleet of computers or for embedded devices. That's it's true power.

Google chose Portage for ChromeOS building for a reason.