Gentoo and Linux from Scratch (LFS) were a great way to learn back in the day (yes, 20-some years ago) — and support relatively custom operating environments through USE flags (e.g., which flavor of Motif did I want to use). I found Gentoo to be a rather practical low-level tradeoff in that era compared to Debian (super old package set and release cadence). You have to bear in mind: there were plenty of Gentoo users out there who weren't into abusing CFLAGS and such. And Portage had such a low bar to climb to create a package (cf. Debian Policy Manual as a description of the arcane nature of Debian package management with dh). Moreover, Ubuntu, which was a good pressure on Debian to modernize, wasn't yet on the mainstream for a good window of time when Gentoo really took off.
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