I ran Gentoo until shortly after Daniel Robbins left the project. It just started to have problems. A good example is that installing KDE would break to the point of needing to throw everything away unless you installed a few other packages in a very specific order.

That never seemed acceptable to me and I ended up moving over to Arch Linux for a good 10+ years before the instability of it finally got to me and I moved to Ubuntu.

Having said all of that, I'm glad to hear that Gentoo is stable for you. I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo and I got the feeling that after he left there were mistakes made in terms of everything working reasonably.

Your description of Arch reminds me of an experience I had with linode and arch years back. Due to an internal hardware issue, they basically lost my server. When I went to recreate, I discovered that you couldn't just update the world because it would immediately result in a broken system. You instead had to reconfigure a few things before updating the world.

I no longer use Linode.

At some point the vendor has to take responsibility. That's a large part of why I like Ubuntu, they do. It works every day without me having to worry about it.

I used to run Gentoo. At one point, trying to resolve dependency conflicts, and not knowing what I was trying to do, I uninstalled libc. Obviously, my system immediately became unusable.

I actually appreciate that Gentoo is set up to allow me to run that command if I want to.

But I did move off of Gentoo due to constant dependency conflicts. They took forever to deal with and they were pretty well guaranteed to happen whenever you didn't hold to a strict and frequent update schedule.