Me too. It has the best and only package management system with the required configurability for many complex but real situations that make other distros a non-option. The biggest drawback of course is if you don't update a box for awhile you have to redo from stage3 - rolling releases are a double-edged sword. In theory, portage solves this. In practice, it just gets to a certain level of ungrokkable problems and you have to pull the parachute. Currently battling with ZFS root (stage3 and portage snapshots on same filesystem) as a workaround. It's nontrivial getting that up and running again. But once I do it's probably going to be a stable workhorse for 5+ years. I'm done with Apple.
Honestly the only build system/package manager that could even compare to portage in versatility is spack. It's aimed at HPC so it's not really oriented towards desktop or even normal server packaging but it gives you what is basically the use-flags and slots systems. And bonus points for striving to get nix style reproducibility.
Zfs root on my daily driver machine is held together by... blood sacrifice .,built it's first kernel in Feb 2014 and have rescued it at least three times from catastrophic update neglect
I finally killed a fedora install 2years unupdated...I quit trying to restore it after an hour and just took my data off
That parachute even comes with a spare for some open heart surgery on a system. Migrating no-multilib -> multilib is totally doable with some careful chrooting and a rebuild from stage1.
NixOS was a fine “next step” for me from Gentoo (and arch, and probably literally every distro out there). It has an even more powerful package manager, and makes the system config a breeze, while still giving you all the control. Oh, and you can just roll back/forward to your heart’s content! Also, ZFS on root is supported by a simple flag.
When I used it (and I did use it enthusiastically for awhile) NixOS had other issues. Chiefly, large portions of real world configuration did not conform to its model. While you could in theory make anything work, I found that managing actual configuration (already enough of a challenge) with the additional backflips of straining it through the NixOS model was just not worth the time. It worked well for simple configurations that were well used, but once you strayed from that path it became increasingly tedious, while you also had the NixOS change risk added to everything else to manage over time. Final assessment at the time: relatively inappropriate for complex configuration requirements. Could be time for a revisit.
