MX Linux does a nice job with SysV, and Artix uses OpenRC. I've tried both and liked them, though Artix broke pretty hard once during an upgrade. But yeah, it was hard to find a Linux distro that runs well without systemd.
It’s a great distro, gives you loads of choice (even lets you go with systemd) and the developers actually care about open source and the act of giving a shit (unlike what I see from the systemd bug tracker).
For anyone wondering, when you install Gentoo, you untar a stage3.tar.gz into a / that you chrooted into. That tar file contains a precompiled environment and toolchain. From there most things get compiled.
For example "emerge x11-base/xorg-x11" would install X and related utilities, but you wouldn't do that. X is a dependency, what you really want is whatever desktop environment you like. So "emerge qtile" and the rest is handled. The compilation time thing isn't a big issue on any reasonable solid state hardware, and there are precompiled packages available for large popular projects (like office suites).
If you only care about how fast the system will be, you only need to compile the compiler twice, not thrice. Probably that is his problem and why it's taken him 7 years so far. He should have compiled the compiler thrice...
I wrote scripts that build from scratch to my custom desktop configuration in < 8 hours using Packer on a single i7. I'm also toying with the idea of a buildserver that creates precompiled binaries :)
10-Year Gentoo veteran here. Every time I move away from Gentoo I come back purely because I have some headache caused by systemd or pulseaudio (which seems to depend on / be depended on by systemd). If they didn't get in the way I wouldn't care, because not needing to compile packages would be nice.
Recently I purchased some bluetooth headphones, they don't work well without PulseAudio and so far I haven't gotten anything but raw audio files to playback directly.
Same goes for Firefox. I think there's an intermediate plugin to play directly to ALSA, but for now I'm just playing spotify||netflix via chrome.
Point is, it's slowly becoming harder to avoid Systemd and PulseAudio. Because all the major distros use them, the support, development and documentation for !systemd has died off radically :(
12 years here. I finally let pulse back on my system a year or two ago when after enough upgrades (notably Firefox) my sound config went from perfectly fine for years to unreliable. At least pulse is better now. And more stable than the version I have to use on work machines (ubuntu). No dependencies on systemd required, though, that project will never be installed. OpenRC is great, and it's simple enough that it doesn't need any team of paid devs figuring out how to cram more features into it.
There is apulse this which I used successfully in the past, it’s included in the portage tree. Since I happen to like systemd itself, I don’t have much of an issue with that. I used to avoid pulseaudio and networkmanager, but on my latest installation on a laptop I just included them and they are working fine for now. We’ll see how long they survive this time, esp NetworkManager is starting to bother me again ;)
I used to have a poetteringware mask, but I had to let pulseaudio slide (but without udev and systemd (eudev works well)) because I couldn't find support for my non-standard setup anywhere for alsa.
Your point is super valid and it makes me sad, I donate/try to support as much as I can but the amount of developers that are apatheic to niche cases is increasing day by day.
I'm surprised to hear of problems with Firefox and ALSA. On all my Gentoo machines I simple compile Firefox with USE="-pulseaudio" which sets --enable-alsa within Firefox's build. Still working fine up to and including Firefox 66 directly to ALSA.
