As someone whose first Linux distribution was Gentoo back in 2005, what took you so long? I mean, it's always been a 'high maintenance' distribution. The appeal for me early on was that it forced me to understand more about how a Linux distribution worked, compiling different kernel options, etc. After a few years I moved to simpler distributions like CentOS, then Arch and finally just using MacOS to ssh to a VM with stable Debian releases.
