I've used Gentoo since 2007ish on three separate machines, installed it on a couple more I didn't own, and on my own devices have totally broken it a few times in the earlier years forcing a complete reinstall. (One time I saved it after I had killed /bin et al. by bootstrapping with busybox...) The feeling of control and having essentially everything the way I want is seductive and easy to miss when I work with Windows or any other Linux. And for some reason fixing the system when it goes wrong gives me a bit of pleasure, which not many other things do. This year I swapped out my nVidia GTX260 for a Radeon HD 7950, so of course X wouldn't start. It's a simple issue though, about 10-20 minutes later I had graphics again and my dual monitors setup with my vertical one rotated properly. Huzzah!

Portage is my favorite package manager, but it's not without its problems. I occasionally get frustrated by dependency conflicts. One thing I think the submission should have mentioned is the `eix` tool, which is to Portage's `emerge` as `slocate` is to `find`. It's a much better experience for finding out what packages are available or a description of a package.

Another feature I like about Gentoo is 'rolling releases'. I don't ever have to do a dist-upgrade, I just update the packages I want to update when they have updates. And I'm still happily using gnome2.

Some people are offended by the installation process. I think that's a good enough litmus-test for whether they would enjoy Gentoo or not.