

I agree! On gentoo even if you do manage to break your system you’d also know how to fix it (since you basically spent days installing it by hand…).
I ran it on my pc for a few years and the only source of breakage were nvidia drivers (in the past they sucked possibly even more). I remember running it using VESA drivers for like a week until I figured out how to fix it.
It’s really nice how much you can customize it and make it really fit your own use-case. I once ran it in a fully offline raspberry pi for 5-10 years (without updates) and it was rock solid. The hard disk it ran on and the power adapter died, but the sd card was mounted read-only so it lasted the full 10 years without any corruption. I kept a backup of the root filesystem on the sd-card so restoring it to a new disk was super-easy. I also ran the hdd in btrfs raid-1 mode with a itself (two partitions), so that it could self-recover from random corruption due to power losses (I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but it never caused any trouble) It was just running 1 service and that’s it, without any monitor or keyboard connected. I even made a small program with a single-key interface to run admin commands directly without needing a screen or any login (press “b”=reboot, “s” for btrfs scrub, for example). Trying to customize, say, an ubuntu like that would have been a nightmare. It took forever to compile everything on the raspberry pi though.

Not to mention the entitlement of saying “But let’s be honest, if you’re reading this you can probably pay for it,” Not everybody has disposable income, you know.
I stopped reading there.