One of the things I liked about Gentoo was the idea of building everything yourself. They even had a license manager that would allow you to decide if you want

One of the things I liked about Gentoo was the idea of building everything yourself. They even had a license manager that would allow you to decide if you wanted to use packages based on their license (and would warn you when the license changed). I always wondered why that never caught on. But binary distributions are just convenient. Even MCC was a binary distribution and that's going a long way back. I remember rebuilding everything by hand because I wanted a lean system that included exactly what I wanted and nothing more, but that was considered pretty extreme even at that time. One of the problems with having the flexibility of a pure source based system (including being about to recompile with exactly the flags and hence features you want) is making a decent dependency graph. If you install package X and it wants capability A, it's practically impossible to guarantee that it will "all just work" because the user can easily screw it up. In many ways, this was one of the problems with Gentoo (apart from it being unreasonable these days to keep a complete system up to date while recompiling every single package -- it just takes too much time). Of course Gentoo (and derivatives) have binary packages these days as well. I've moved over to Arch which has very minimal configuration for packages and so you have to take responsibility for making everything work. You can easily build things and the build scripts make it very easy to see what patches, etc you are using. However, its a lot more work than most people want. I think the reality of the situation is that most people do no debug their systems. They just use it. If it is "broken" then they complain that it is "broken" and wait for someone to fix it. Actually maintaining your system is akin to working on hotrods in your garage. It's mostly a hobby, even for professionals.