I just (last 2 weeks) switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu for my personal/home VMs (Linode!). The risk of crap breaking on a emerge world ... was just too high. I think the final straw wsa something related to python2/3 issues breaking emerge it's self. I rebooted it into safe mode, spun up a new Ubuntu image, and rsync'ed to /old_linode/ and then reinstalled bind9 and apache2 and etc. The thing I liked about having local compiles for everything is you could gdb any system binary. As a C programmer for many years, I like seeing real code.