Since 2004 - 19 years! I moved to it because at the time I kept getting stuck in dependency hell on other distributions I’d tried and Portage at least gave me the knowledge and tools to fix things myself.

It’s been a while. I began with Debian around the year 2000. In 2002 or 2003, I built a new computer and installed Linux From Scratch (LFS) by following the guide book. A year or two later (ca. 2004), I was ready to automate things and switched to Gentoo, hoping that portage would make dealing with upgrades and dependencies much easier. I’ve been here ever since! Nowadays new machines get Funtoo and I’ve migrated most of my older ones; but Gentoo and Funtoo retain enough similarity that I don’t consider to have left.

Since 2013 I think 10 years with the same two installs.

Whenever arch switched to pulse audio because Ubuntu did it. But it was completely broken on my setup so the question that drove me to gentoo was “How do I rollback?” the answer was use the previous packages in the cache which I had cleaned :/.

Using portage is so much more powerful and does exactly what it says, and there’s is usually always a way to get back to a working state.

Personally I’ve been using Gentoo for about 2 years now (or a year and a half?). I’d tried all the mainstream distros from Ubuntu (before the move to the Unity desktop and the integrated ads) to Arch over the years and to be fair - there was nothing really wrong with any of them. I’ve also gotten halfway through the LFS book before getting bored back in the day.

Started using Gentoo because my friend said I can compile every package from source with my own optimization flags set. Figured maybe it’ll give me better performance. Not that my system was performing bad in any way, I just like to tinker with things. End result? Probably no real improvement, but I do have fairly low idle memory usage (Using KDE Plasma desktop) and somehow I love that installing packages has more weight to it. It also keeps me from installing packages with a billion dependencies unless I really need them. But mostly I love that it has taught me a LOT about how Linux works underneath - using Linux Mint I never really had to worry about what my init system is. And with Arch I just nuked my install and didn’t bother fixing it - through no fault of Arch itself, of course.

17 years here. :) I did a bit of distros hopping (surprisingly, the one I loved the most beside Gentoo was KDE Neon, for how polished the interface experience was), but always had a least one gentoo running home. Now all my machines are Gentoo again, it’s just the most stable distros for me (if anything, because it doesn’t try to be smart and let me configure things my way).

Also, now that I’m confident patching big C programs, this is the dream distro for tinkering. I just fork ebuilds in my own portage tree, add my patches in the ebuilds, and just like that, I have patched programs managed by my package manager. Still need to do it with each program update, though, so it’s cool, but not perfect.