The thing I'm imagining is that if there was something I wanted the USE flags for, I'd just end up compiling myself in a prefix. I already do this for some pack

The thing I'm imagining is that if there was something I wanted the USE flags for, I'd just end up compiling myself in a prefix. I already do this for some packages because of the issue with Gentoo removing things they consider stale which is the problem. I don't need USE flags all the time or compiling everything with -O3 -march or whatever, for most things it's just a plus that it might be faster. I think the one thing that might actually matter for me is in Gentoo fixing broken things is more direct, just compile, while I've had issues that persist on ubuntu even after reinstalling something. It just felt like there was somehow "stale state" in my OS which even sounds ridiculous saying. But, at this point, I can't handle breaks in portage because while you can fix things, it requires mental effort on my part and I'm tired of it. EDIT: reading your comment, if you're asking for my opinion I mean look at this in particular: https://bugs.gentoo.org/420783 https://bugs.gentoo.org/420783 ioquake3 was literally removed from portage for this "bug" which even if you accept that it's a hypothetical issue has easy patches that were never included, and it was removed, essentially removing hosts of open source fpses from portage! I even read a forum post talking about "upstream" not caring...upstream? ioquake3's release was charity, it's not like an active project. This has been happening for a while. I've been here since 2008 or so and the instability and removal of slots within months has gotten out of hand. Again, the tooling is great, emerge, eix, the whole system of configuration files is awesome and I'm just used to openrc. I wish I could keep them but the slot removals in portage has just become such a chore to deal with.