The big advantage is going through the process of putting the system together which gives you knowledge that you can apply to other distributions. It makes weird errors feel a lot less intimidating and you build more confidence in resolving things yourself when google doesn't help. In other words you start to understand what parts you need to make a functioning OS.
Gentoo installs can be very snappy on old hardware, I ran it for a while on an old AMD Athlon and it booted faster and felt way more responsive than much newer machines running Vista etc.
Of course it's not as quick to install and get to a desktop than say Ubuntu, but it isn't really trying to be. Having said that it's really not all that hard, if you've used Linux before and can follow an instruction manual you will be up and going in an hour or two depending on how fast your computer can compile the code.
It's also rolling release, so you don't have to worry about doing big distribution upgrades. You can keep a gentoo install rolling away for years quite happily.
Gentoo installs can be very snappy on old hardware, I ran it for a while on an old AMD Athlon and it booted faster and felt way more responsive than much newer machines running Vista etc.
Of course it's not as quick to install and get to a desktop than say Ubuntu, but it isn't really trying to be. Having said that it's really not all that hard, if you've used Linux before and can follow an instruction manual you will be up and going in an hour or two depending on how fast your computer can compile the code.
It's also rolling release, so you don't have to worry about doing big distribution upgrades. You can keep a gentoo install rolling away for years quite happily.