Hrm, longtime gentoo user here, since 2002. I have used everything else, slack, redhat (since like the MIT TSX archive times, still have the floppies), debian, mandrake, SuSe, MX, Anti-X, Puppy, Yellow Dog. Those are distros I _used_ not installed for fun, but used for work or daily drivers. I am not sure why, but I keep going back to Gentoo. My main desktop at work and home is gentoo after a fairly long hiatus of Slack, Mint, MX. I think I see (with the exception of MX and Slack) a lot of distros going the way of "Windows" in their design choices towards users.
If you are not a "power user" perhaps gentoo is not for you. I teach at a uni, and feel like if you are not a developer, perhaps most modern linux distros are for you... but if you are a developer, then perhaps something like Gentoo or Arch might be a good fit. NOT because you will be doing more work, but because a lot of the others are going towards spoon-fed operating systems that make too many choices for you, or phone home / make search suggestions too much for you.
OTOH, perhaps you can stop emerging bloated apps. Or get something newer than a "old laptop". No one said you should recompile every dang linux package on machine that has a slower than everything else storage and bus because it is portable. Recall, you normally sacrifice for portability.
I hope you continue to use linux, no matter the flavor, and to each his own, but I think many comments here are along the same thread: "I tried this free thing, where I could design it myself, build it all myself, and it was _work_ and I did not like it", when in reality the idea is "you have ultimate control, and it will cost you a little _work_, are you OK with that?"
If you are not a "power user" perhaps gentoo is not for you. I teach at a uni, and feel like if you are not a developer, perhaps most modern linux distros are for you... but if you are a developer, then perhaps something like Gentoo or Arch might be a good fit. NOT because you will be doing more work, but because a lot of the others are going towards spoon-fed operating systems that make too many choices for you, or phone home / make search suggestions too much for you.
OTOH, perhaps you can stop emerging bloated apps. Or get something newer than a "old laptop". No one said you should recompile every dang linux package on machine that has a slower than everything else storage and bus because it is portable. Recall, you normally sacrifice for portability.
I hope you continue to use linux, no matter the flavor, and to each his own, but I think many comments here are along the same thread: "I tried this free thing, where I could design it myself, build it all myself, and it was _work_ and I did not like it", when in reality the idea is "you have ultimate control, and it will cost you a little _work_, are you OK with that?"