If you don’t care about the benefits of Gentoo, such as the excellent use flags system, then no it’s very much not worth it.

If you’d rather that every program comes compiled with every possible option, and requires every possible dependency because of this, then you’d be better suited by a binary distro.

If, however, you’re the kind of person that wonders “why does my torrent client support sound, which pulls in these five audio dependencies? I don’t ever need it to make noise, can’t I just disable the ability for torrents to go ‘bing’ when they’re done and forego installing those dependencies?”, then gentoo might be for you.

Gentoo seems great if you want to experiment with patches to major programs or system libraries. That’s what I used it for.

Gentoo is more about the fun of building a Linux distro that is perfectly tailored to your hardware and personal preferences. Sometimes you’ll see a performance increase of 0.01%, sometimes 25%+. Just depends on a lot of different things.

The build times are really only a consideration on first or second install of the OS. And even with your first install, you’ll probably want to start with the pre-built options, and then gradually move away from that to compiling more and more of your own system.

There are a couple apps like Firefox that also have pre-compiled binaries available for Gentoo, so no waiting there. Of course, there’s also Flatpak for desktop-based apps.

Otherwise, you just compile what you want, when you want. And you can tell Portage how much in terms of cores/threads/resources it gets to use when compiling, so that it can just run in the background while you’re doing your normal thing (or scheduled for when You’re not using your machine).

Portage is also a phenomenal package manager, and can track and satisfy all dependencies for you as-needed. You can also specify what elements of your system to keep on stable, vs testing, etc. It’s not like Slackware.

Gentoo is what was used to build ChromeOS, along with many other distros. It’s as complex/simple, secure/insecure, private/un-private, latest-and-greatest/LTS as you tell it to be. You can choose to update things continuously in the background, or just once a week overnight, or on any other schedule that you want.

You’ll probably learn some new things in the course of installing it, but follow the handbook to the letter, avail yourself of the community, and be patient to start with. It works for me, and I like it, but there are plenty of excellent pre-cooked distros that are also great. I’m just a tinkerer by nature, and enjoy getting increasingly more out of my machines over time.

Gentoo is for burning cpu time, not much more.

Why would you use Gentoo for criminal activity over any other operating system including Windows and Mac?

If you want to keep your installation and save a little bit of time updating it then use the binary repo.

afaik, the “main gimmick” of gentoo is to have a distro that is 100% optimized for your PC. That aside, I don’t see a point installing it unless your PC is centuries old and really need the extra speed boost.